Connect with us:
406-755-6550
1297 Burns Way
Kalispell, Montana 59901
Connect with us on social :
Sleep is our primary detox. It is undervalued in our culture and underestimated as a factor in health. While I am supportive of the hard core work and play ethic of the modern era, I am compelled to highlight this very important area of self care.
Read some sobering evidence here.
It's cool to be hot in menopause.
The average lifespan in the United States in the year 1900 was about 51, and in 1800 it was 39. The average age of menopause is about 51. Thus, in all of human history, menopause is a relatively new life stage. Most women simply did not live long enough to reach it, and those that did , did not spend much time in it.
Currently, the average lifespan for a women in the United States is 81. It is interesting to think about what may explain this. I think we have nutrition and health care to thank. As we were, before the modern age, we were able to reproduce for the majority of our lifespan. Could it be that we are outliving our design ? Or could it be that our nutrition and health have unlocked heretofore unexpressed genetic potential for long life? Either way, a modern woman will spend nearly 40% of her life in menopause, and this percentage will only increase as lifespan increases. Moreover, the number of people in menopause will increase as the population ages.
In the developed world, we can now eat a scientifically based, nutritionally optimal meal 365 days per year. We can do evidence based physical activities that counteract the physical deteriorations of age, such as fat deposition, bone density loss, and muscle loss.
Menopause is no longer a thing to be dreaded. Menopause is life cycle phase like adolescence and pregnancy, and people deserve support during such times. As an Ob/Gyn, I rely on a constantly improving body of data and recommendations about the care of menopausal women. They involve increased surveillance in the form of mammograms, bloodwork, bone scans, colonoscopy and the like. We evaluate and make recommendations about enhanced nutrition, specialized supplements, tailored fitness training, and yes, medications including hormones, all in the service of optimal health.
Older women should take note, and see that they are up to date on their health care. Younger women should picture themselves how they would like to be in menopause.
Stay tuned as we devote a few Medical Mondays to menopause, an increasingly important topic.
I am not one to say we are just a complex well organized set of chemicals and electrical impulses. I believe we are so much more than that; so much more the sum of our parts. That said, it is really helpful to be familiar with the parts, especially the brain.
This blog post could easily be titled, " The Care and Feeding of Your Brain". I could say it requires lots of exotic supplements. But that would be wrong.
You already know the basics. Optimal brain health requires all of these : Good hydration, good nutrition taken through the day, regular exercise and adequate sleep. ( Check out my pages on these topics which are hyperlinked ! )
What you may not think about as much is reading. Technically speaking, reading is exercise for your brain. But I would say it is exercise for the mind and food for the soul. Read more HERE.
Ever wonder how to get dinner done and a workout accomplished all at the same time ? Try this technique to get it all done.
Read MoreHigh Intensity Interval Training is a time efficient effective way of getting gains in fitness and weight loss. Learn more about this new school way of getting fit.
Read MoreThis post explores the connection between your waistline and your cycles. Learn about the common condition Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome.
Read MoreGet the inside story on our most fundamental of cycles, the menstrual cycle. Check out " Menstrual Cycle 101 " and gain insight on everything from puberty to menopause.
Read MoreWhat do you need to know about protein powders ? Get information without hype here.
Read MoreNeed motivation to exercise ? Here's a comprehensive list of tips to help.
Read More
This is nobody's favorite topic. But it happens with fair regularity. I would like to honor and support all of my patients and all others who have gone through this by posting on this unfortunate life event.
Miscarriage is private, but is should not be a source of shame. It is sad, but should not destroy hope. It is no one's fault. It is not from sex, hard work, or stress.
Those around the patient want to help but it is hard to know how. I have posted for them too. For a link that will inform all concerned about this common and difficult life event, click here. Please note that this material is medically graphic but appropriate for mature teen and adult audiences.
How do you find the energy and motivation to do the things you want to do ? That is going to be the topic for at least a couple blog posts this week. Why ? because you have indicated that you find this a challenge.
It's all a matter of inspiration. But who can rely on inspiration ? Can you find it or make it ? Click here to find some surprisingly old wisdom and new science on this critical issue.
Happy Friday !
Please let me invite you to peruse the entire Nutrition section of our blog, which is the first section of the Health pages to be finished.
I think you will find some novelty here, such as information on how to obtain healthy food on a budget. There also the standard information about nutrients, but also information about the timing of meals and combinations of different foods.
I hope you enjoy the content, including the graphics and photos, most of which I produced myself.
Gina at the summit of the " Dish" run at Stanford, after her 20th reunion. http://web.stanford.edu/group/runningclub/Runs/Dish.htm
There is a great deal one could say about exercise. However, talking or writing about exercise is only useful if it leads to people actually doing it. So, since I am committing the Wednesday column to the topic of exercise, I decided to reach out and ask about your interests and needs on the subject of exercise. I would like to tailor the column to meet these needs. Here is a link to a short survey that will be fun and illuminating to take.
Gina with Zumba Royalty Acea Theroux Zes and Nancy Mehring
I have really decided to give exercise some serious focus because I really feel it is at the center of optimal mental and physical health. If you have mediocre exercise and excellent nutrition you are probably moderately healthy. However if you have mediocre nutrition and excellent exercise you are probably very healthy. Plus, good nutrition seems to follow in the wake of good exercise, but not as much the other way around. And of course, the worst attitude can be fixed better by a good workout than a good meal.
I realize there are serious and challenging obstacles to exercise, from money to peer support to childcare challenges, injury, chronic illness, social culture, motivation, depression and more. But I would like to explore and deconstruct these and look for solutions.
I am hoping this survey and its results will help pin some of these reasons down and help us solve them.
Next Wednesday I will post the results, and add a few thoughts of my own from over twenty years in medical practice and over 40 years exercising regularly.
Many thanks, Dr. Gina
What does vagina steaming and the recent measles outbreak having common ? Need a hint ? OK. What can make people on both sides of the political spectrum mad ? You guessed it ! The anti - science movement.
According to that venerable site rationalwiki.org, anti science
" refers to persons or organizations that promote their ideology over scientifically-verified evidence,[3] usually either by denying said evidence and/or creating their own."
Recall that science is advanced through the scientific method, which involves testing hypotheses with experiments, then revising said hypotheses. Experiments should be on done on that which is measurable, done blinded, controlled, and should be reproducible and peer reviewed by the appropriate scientific institution. Science is always undergoing a process of refinement based on observable facts.
This should be clear. Yet the media and advertising to which we are daily exposed has become a brew of fake science and real science. How is a person to know the difference ? Well you can use your gut feeling of course. ( And I have a bad feeling about vagina steaming.) Or, you can have a look at my section of this site where I try to give some help on this issue. It is called Information and Learning. I try to give you some tools with which to navigate the information stream coming at you every day.
Let's look at some hot news topics where anti-science is in play: climate change, genetic engineering, vaccines, juice cleanses, GMO food, stem cell research, and yes vagina steaming. These topics are especially hot in election years, and when money is involved.
Here is a great article in Scientific American about a science quiz given to presidential candidates 2012.
Click here to either laugh or cry.
Here too, is a fair handed look at anti-vaccine sentiment on both sides of the aisle from Slate.
Here is fantastic compendium of articles from various writers on the anti-science movement from Huffington Post.
I would like everyone to take a charitable look at the nature of our national dialog. Feelings are running high, especially in the wake of the recent measles outbreak. In this climate, where there are many voices clamoring to be heard, let us keep the dialog civil and ahem, scientific, whenever possible.
In that spirit, I will share with you an article about one of my favorite most well intentioned celebrity health gurus, Gwyneth Paltrow. Don't get me wrong, I love Gwyneth. Her site, Goop.com is full of lovely recipes and pretty unaffordable clothes. She has a holistic approach and a lovely positive attitude which really does count for a lot. HOWEVER, I cite this article below to show that sweet well intentioned people can get it wrong. Enjoy, and remember that laughter and affection are the best medicines.
Three Reasons You Definitely Shouldn't Get Your Vagina Steamed , from Women's Health
I am working hard on the section of the website under Health entitled " Nutrition". I am really enjoying this since I am a great foodie. However, my section is not finished quite yet. I am really looking forward to you seeing it a a unified whole.
But have written a great deal already, and plenty for you to look at today.
So start by considering that your knowledge of nutrition will depend on your knowledge of the structure of food. Food divides itself fairly neatly into three categories, protein, fat and carbohydrates. I invite you to read around in these particular sections, since they are pretty well rounded out.
Then begin thinking about the fact that nutrition is not only about what you eat, it is about when you eat food and about what you eat it with. In the very near future I will have some content for you on just these topics. Stay tuned for some tasty posts.
Drinks
Modern drinks are the most deranged dietary items on the modern menu. Consider "Rock Star" and the like. They are the deliberate and crass result of corporate engineering for maximal addictiveness at the least cost. Cheap artificial colors, caffeine, sugar and flavorings combined with carbonated water are all put into a flashy package, and marketed aggressively to young and old alike.
Little did we know that rapidly digesting frequently consumed sugary drinks like these would have more to do with the obesity epidemic than consumption of actual dietary fat. But we should have known.
Now we have in sharp focus the fact that simple carbohydrates of all kinds, sugar and flour included, jet into our bloodstream faster than we can metabolize them. That spike in blood sugars triggers the body to store fat and very shortly thereafter, one is left devoid of energy in the so called sugar crash.
Not only has this contributed to obesity, it has also contributed to heart disease, diabetes and the like. Moreover, these phenomena wreck havoc on mood and attention span, conceivably influencing behavior in both children and adults. Finally there is increasing evidence that foods like this contribute to irrtation in the gastrointestinal tract, possibly making us vulnerable to more inflammation and even autoimmune disease.
Rant over. My newly minted section on Nutrition is just a beginning, but I would like to show the Drinks section to you. In it, I discuss more about carbohydrate metabolism and even go into the Glycemic index. Don't worry, we will do a lot more than talk about what not to eat. The most fun is yet to come when we get to the great things that we should be eating and drinking. This blog post will highlight drinks from a nutritional point of view. Click on the beverage below to read more.
Bath, England
There is a village in England called Bath. It is called this after the natural heated pools that are found there. There and in similar places around the world people have sought healing waters. Theses waters have alleviated pains in muscles and joints perhaps by virtue of their warmth and enhancement of mobility and circulation. In such places the spa was born.
I have always thought of exercise as a spa treatment from the inside out. Of course it takes more effort than simply slipping into a heated pool, but the benefits are greater. For example, the cardiovascular system is healed and strengthened. The immune system is boosted. Muscle and bone growth is stimulated and fat is burned. Arthritic joints are mobilized and balance is improved. Stress is relieved and mood is enhanced. Moreover, confidence and a sense of accomplishment are created.
All of this sounds appealing and yet exercise is so hard to sell. Once begun, seems hard for many to continue. This is one of the main challenges I face in my practice: How to inspire people to exercise, and even more, how to educate them to be consistent in perpetuity.
I am just starting to build my section of the website which deals with fitness. I have surveyed many authoritative websites having to do with exercise but my favorite so far is the American College of Sports Medicine, or ascm.org. I have looked for their answers to some fundamental questions. In the following link, I will share a few of them with you. I plan to devote the Wednesday Wellness blog post exclusively to exercise. Join me as we learn from the ground up.
Everyone is interested in medical news. It is inherently sensational. But, it is challenging to report, and even journalists with the best of intentions have a hard time getting it right.
When an intelligent patient comes to the office and spends 15 minutes with her doctor, and the doctor goes through a detailed explanation, under the best of circumstances, only part of that will be correctly remembered. Here are some links if you are interested in reading more about that :
How Much Can Patients Learn in a 15-Minute Doctor Visit?
New Prescriptions: How Well Do Patients Remember Important Information?
The difficulties are on both sides. Doctors have crammed schedules. They aren't always the best of communicators. Sometimes the doctor and the patient have differing agendas for the visit. And the patients are often distressed about what they hear, which impairs understanding and memory.
Consider classroom learning. I need to hear things and be thinking about them, take notes, see diagrams about the topic, get handouts, look it over, and repeat it all before it is really ingrained. This type of thing is also what patients need to understand a topic. They know this and so they head for the internet. That's where it gets exciting.
Since I am in the process of building a website for patients, I have been researching other doctors' websites. They range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Most of the sites have some useful information. However too many of them contain unfounded claims and conflicts of interest by way of selling unproven remedies. In many cases the remedies involve foods or supplements which in limited lower quality studies, showed promise, but were never followed up or proven.
I will highlight perhaps the most prominent of these internet doctors, Dr. Mehmet Oz. With the most impeccable of academic credentials, and a media empire to boot, he is under serious fire for making unsubstantiated claims and hawking unproven products. The best documentation of this to date is through Vox Media, what I would call the thinking person's news network. Until I read the series of articles at Vox, I had no idea, since I do not have a TV. Check out this entertaining and informative debate here.
Meanwhile, if you would like to read more about how to safely navigate the internet, check a series of pages on my site, starting HERE. There are lots of internal links so be prepared to click. I really put my heart into these pages since I believe strongly in freedom of information and the patient empowerment movement. I hope they are beneficial for you.
It is a rare day when I learn a new word. But in all fairness, this word hasn't been around forever. It is: LISTICLE. It is a composite of list and article.
We've all seen them on blogs and in magazines in line at the grocery store. They are considered an easy way to write, and as such are looked down upon by writing and blogging snobs. But, as a doctor who teaches, I am going to go on record as being in favor of lists and listicles.
Lists simplify and unify a topic. They are a way of grouping items, and they help us know how many items we need to remember. And, as I have said before, establishing structure, habits and routine in life is critical to achieving optimal health, both mental and physical. (Think daily gratefulness journal or flossing your teeth. )
Here is my first little listicle for you on this Structure Sunday : 3 Ways to Get Ready for the Week.
1. Clean your house.
Did you know that there is scientific evidence that a messy space depresses the mood just as much as a depressed mood results in a messy space ? Don't let either happen to you. (Click here to see just one of the articles.) Just remember that you don't have to do it all at once. Click here for a great listicle entitled " 6 Ways to Clean House When You're Depressed". Here are some more interesting articles on this topic.
How Cleaning and Organizing Can Improve Your Physical and Mental Health
2. Clean your desk.
It should come as no surprise that cleaning your desk would have the same type of mental and physical benefits. Cleaning your desk means opening all your mail, checking all your bills, and recording all your responsibilities on your calendar, with alerts. You can also dust, and redo your stacks and idea boards, making things aesthetically pleasing as well. This is a great way to take charge, reduce stress, and make your like more beautiful. Check out this first rate blogging:
3. Set your goals.
Look at goals for the Quarter, Month, Week and Monday. Use your choice of paper, cards or an App like Evernote. Psychology and self help experts the world round advocate the setting of goals. But it is only recently that we have gotten some real help with this. We need to have SMART goals.
SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time bound.
Make sure all your goals meet the SMART criteria and you will have not just a smart, but a brilliant week.
Want to try EVERNOTE for free ? Click HERE.
If you grew up in the 70s, you will recall the extreme emphasis on the low fat diet. Thank goodness that singular emphasis has gone by the wayside. Back then, the best science of the day indicated that saturated fat and cholesterol was the primary concern. Therefore, we were cautioned to reduce our consumption of things like beef, butter, and heavily marbleized meats from feedlot cows, which are full of saturated fat.
Here is a section from this websites page on Fats.
The Chemistry :
Different fats are different hydrocarbons. They have different levels of saturation, meaning a varying number of hydrogen atoms along their carbon chain structures. Fats can be classified as polyunsaturated, monounsaturated and saturated. More hydrogen atoms makes the chain more saturated, solid and more stable to temperature. Unsaturated fats are more liquid at a given temperature, and clog the arteries less.
Click HERE to learn more.
omega three fatty acids
Back in the seventies, we were encouraged to substitute margarine for butter since it was made of less saturated fat, including some trans fats. Since then we have discovered the dangers of trans fats, which, have been prevalent in margarines. There is also concern that overly unsaturated so called polyunsaturated fats are easily oxidized , and then become unhealthy to consume.
More importantly, we have discovered the benefits of monounsaturates like olive oil, which reduce cardiac risk. Additionally we have come to understand the short chain fatty acids, like omega 3s which actually reduce risk of cardiac disease and also help with inflammatory disorders.
Finally we have come to understand that it is our carbohydrate intake that has contributed greatly to the problem of obesity, which leads to so many other problems including heart disease. In particular, our simple refined carbohydrate ( e.g. white flour products) and plain old sugar intake has been off the biological charts. These are almost always processed foods not found in nature and they enter our bodies very rapidly. We cannot metabolize them quickly enough and they are stored as fat. Additionally they can raise triglycerides, which in women, are more associated with heart disease than cholesterol.
Taking all of this into consideration, what are the current recommendations ? Roughly a quarter of our calories should be each from fat and protein, and half from carbs. But the devil's in the details. The fats should all be healthy ones like olive oil, avocado, and walnuts, and the carbs should be complex, unrefined, and nutritious. You probably think I mean whole wheat seedy bread. Actually I mean carbs even more complex than that: vegetables and fruits. Yes, they provide carbs too.
In summary, our current thinking on consuming fats, and avoiding becoming fat has changed quite a bit in the last 40 years. And quite frankly, we are eating quite a bit better because of it. Diet conscious folks used to run around with a diet coke, and slice of wheat toast and margarine for breakfast. These days, it would be more like an omelette with kale and fresh tomatoes, salsa, fresh fruit, green tea, and a small bowl of oat bran cereal with olive oil and sea salt. Bon appetite.
