Johnson Family Chiropractic of Peoria is holding a Grand Opening Ribbon Cutting Ceremony at 3:00 p.m. on March 31, 2011, hosted by Mayor Mark Allen of Peoria Heights, the Peoria Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Peoria Heights Chamber of Commerce. The event is free to the public. Come join in the fun, enjoy free food and beverages, meet the mayor, ask your health questions, and receive valuable coupons for chiropractic services! Kyle Johnson, D.C., uses a chiropractic technique that involves no bending, no twisting, and no cracking. Johnson Family Chiropractic is the only chiropractic clinic in Peoria to specialize in the Activator Methods technique, which is the most popular instrument-assisted adjusting technique in the world. This is your chance to see the Activator instrument in action, to learn about the history of the Activator, and to see for yourself how the Activator differs from other chiropractic techniques. We'd love to see you! Johnson Family Chiropractic 3227 N. Prospect Rd. Peoria, IL 61603 (309) 688-8773 www.johnson-family-chiropractic.com
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Picture this: A woman (we'll call her Bernice) has been asked to be a bridesmaid at a Peoria wedding just four months away. Bernice wants to look fabulous in her dress, but she currently weighs 15 pounds more than her target weight. She wants to lose the pounds, but there's no time to exercise. She sits at a desk all day at work. After a half hour commute across Peoria, she still has to get dinner ready and the kids in bed. Time is a vanishing commodity. Desperate to lose those pounds quickly, Bernice changes her diet, consuming fewer and fewer calories, drinking smoothies and vegetable juices, staying away from pastas, breads, and meats.
Four months go by. Bernice steps on a scale, looking down at the readout nervously. She's amazed! She hit her target weight! She lost all fifteen pounds just by changing her diet! But she still doesn't fit into that dress quite right. And, after the wedding, Bernice returns to her previous diet (she can't go another day without chicken and pasta!) and finds that the pounds fly back on. What happened? There's an old mantra that weight loss is based on both diet and exercise. And it turns out that there's a very solid physiological reason for it. Your body uses a few different types of fuel. It can burn sugar, it can burn fat, and if it doesn't have any excess sugar or fat, it can actually burn muscle tissue. In addition, even if extra fat stores are present, the body burns muscle tissue if the muscle isn't being used. When Bernice reduced her caloric intake, she was actually depriving her body of necessary starches and fats. Her body made the proper decision: it broke down her unused muscles for fuel. Bernice lost weight, to be sure, but the weight she lost was muscle weight, not excess fat. But this is a Catch-22. The human body uses the muscles to burn fuel, which means that the more fit and toned the muscles are, the more fuel can be used. When Bernice started to consume her normal diet again, she didn't have much muscle left to burn all those new calories. Her body again did the appropriate thing: the "extra" fat and sugar was stored in the form of fat. By using a "starvation" diet for a few months, Bernice actually caused herself to gain extra fat and lose the very muscle which ought to burn that fat. She's now in worse health than when she started her diet. What should she have done? Simple cardiovascular exercises, such as walking with hand-held weights just 15 minutes a day. Since Bernice sits at work all day and in the car, she needs to keep her muscles active somehow. Even a daily vacuuming regimen at the office or mowing the yard would keep her muscles active and prevent wasting. Bernice would then have been able to alter her diet slightly (but not radically), and still been able to lose those 15 pounds in time. The best changes are the simple ones. Radical changes usually result in unintended consequences, as Bernice discovered. As anyone who has seen the documentary film "Super Size Me" has learned, sugar has become "the new fat". Research continues to show that excess sugar, especially in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, causes more metabolic and liver problems than fat. High-fructose corn syrup is found in nearly every processed food and drink. This post contains two excerpts from a fascinating piece.
by Bill Sanda Source: The Weston A. Price Foundation For many years, Dr. Meira Fields and her coworkers at the US Department of Agriculture investigated the harmful effects of dietary sugar on rats. They discovered that when male rats are fed a diet deficient in copper, with sucrose as the carbohydrate, they develop severe pathologies of vital organs. Liver, heart and testes exhibit extreme swelling, while the pancreas atrophies, invariably leading to death of the rats before maturity. Sucrose is a disaccharide composed of 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose. Dr. Fields repeated her experiments to determine whether it was the glucose or fructose moiety that caused the harmful effects. Starch breaks down into glucose when digested. On a copper-deficient diet, the male rats showed some signs of copper deficiency, but not the gross abnormalities of vital organs that occur in rats on the sucrose diet. When the rats were fed fructose, the fatal organ abnormalities occured. Lysl oxidase is a copper-dependent enzyme that participates in the formation of collagen and elastin. Fructose seems to interfere with copper metabolism to such an extent that collagen and elastin cannot form in growing animals--hence the hypertrophy of the heart and liver in young males. The females did not develop these abnormalities, but they resorbed their litters. These experiments should give us pause when we consider the great increase in the use of high fructose corn syrup during the past 30 years, particularly in soft drinks, fruit juices and other beverages aimed at growing children, children increasingly likely to be copper deficient as modern parents no longer serve liver to their families. (Liver is by far the best source of copper in human diets.) "The bodies of the children I see today are mush," observed a concerned chiropractor recently. The culprit is the modern diet, high in fructose and low in copper-containing foods, resulting in inadequate formation of elastin and collagen--the sinews that hold the body together. Soft Drinks In the Schools High fructose corn syrup is the primary sweetener used in soft drinks, now readily available to children in school vending machines. The soft drink industry increased US production from 22 to 41 gallons of soft drinks per person a year between 1970 and 1997. Teenagers and children, the industry’s main targets, are among the largest consumers. In the past 10 years, soft drink consumption among children has almost doubled in the United States. Teenage boys now drink, on average, three or more cans of soda per day, and 10 percent drink seven or more cans a day. The average for teenage girls is more than two cans a day, and 10 percent drink more than five cans a day. A typical 20-ounce Coke contains zero fat, zero protein and 67 grams of carbohydrates, usually in the form of high fructose corn syrup. There are an estimated 20,000 vending machines in schools nationwide, according to the National Automatic Merchandising Association. The USDA collected data on vending machines in schools and reported that 88 percent of high schools, 61 percent of middle schools and 14 percent of elementary schools have food or beverage vending machines for student use. Thirty-four percent of high schools and 15 percent of middle schools permit students to use school vending machines at any time, and 6 percent of elementary schools allow students to use vending machines during lunch. (continue reading and references... these statistics are from 2004) That's not really as silly a question as it sounds. Paleontologists long thought that some species of dinosaur had two brains, one in their head and one in their tail. Scientists now believe that the neural cavity in the tail was merely a place where many nerves exited the spinal canal, not a separate brain.
However, exciting new research into the human body shows that even the spinal cord has the capability to process information. The spinal cord has been long thought to simply be a connector between the computer-like brain and the many peripheral nerves of the body. But even under this simplistic model of the central nervous system, it becomes difficult to explain the "spinal arc reflex." The spinal reflex is most easily explained by demonstrating the patellar reflex. When a doctor taps just below your knee, what he's really doing is quickly stretching your patellar tendon (the tendon that attaches your thigh muscles to your shin by way of the kneecap). Patellar tendon nerves send an "I've just been stretched" message to the spinal cord. The spinal cord responds with a lightning quick "Then you'd better tighten up again" message. The thigh muscles contract immediately, usually hard enough to cause a visible kick. This is the simplest form of spinal arc: message to the spine, instruction from the spine. But even this simple arc proves that the spinal cord is more than just a connection from brain to limbs. It has functions and capabilities of its own. According to Dr. Patrick Stroman of Canada's Queen's MRI Facility, ongoing research is proving that the spinal cord is more than just a relay station. While investigating the spinal cord's capacity for processing information, the researchers were astonished to find that more processing was accomplished by people who were alert. If the people were distracted, lethargic, or otherwise non-attentive, the spinal cord (as measured by MRI temperature changes) was much less active. "The effect of attention is one of the reasons that when you're playing sports and you get hurt, you often don't become aware of the injury until after the game when your attention and focus changes," says Dr. Stroman. "We already knew that a person's level of attention affects information processing in the brain, but this finding has made us aware that level of attention has to be properly controlled in research that aims to accurately map spinal cord function." So perhaps the dinosaur's "second brain" was, after all, more important that current paleontologists suggest. Although having an information-processing spinal cord isn't quite as nifty as having a second brain, daily new discoveries of the capabilities of the central nervous system continue to astonish. Continuing our recent theme of the positive impact of chiropractic upon top-flight athletes, today's story comes from Australia. It's a land of giant spiders, kangaroos, large opera houses, and horse racing.
Jockey Corey Brown overcame all odds to win the recent Australia Cup horse race. What odds? Well, Mr. Brown had a horse fall on him only a week before. Horses are very large creatures, which always seem bigger when you're standing right next to them. I've never seen a horse from immediately below while it's laying on top of me, but I can only imagine that it would seem massive. And hard to push off. According to KGBAnswers.com, the average racehorse weighs over half a ton, depending on the horse's physique and size. That's a lot of animal lying on top of you. And remember that jockeys are usually quite slender and light. I'd be less worried about a hulk like Arnold Schwarzenegger under a horse, but a jockey... ! Naturally, Mr. Brown was worried that he'd broken something. His sides were very painful and he wasn't able to ride without considerable discomfort. Broken ribs take a long time to heal. Ribs are meant to protect the heart, lungs, and stomach. But because of their strange and curving shape, there's usually very little that can be done in the way of bracing, casting, or protecting. Broken ribs usually heal on their own (consult an orthopedic surgeon), but they require several weeks to heal. In the meantime, even slight motions like breathing can cause exquisite pain. The jarring and bouncing on a racehorse would be absolutely excruciating. Fortunately, it was eventually determined that Mr. Brown had not broken any ribs. Desperate to ride in that weekend's Australia Cup (a fairly important event in the horse racing community, I understand), Mr. Brown turned to his chiropractor. The chiropractor examined him and found that four of his ribs had been subluxated (slightly dislocated) from their normal attachment sites on the spinal vertebrae. Mr. Brown's pain was caused by a combination of the inflammation at the area of subluxation, the stretch and strain of the muscles between the ribs (the intercostal muscles), and the nerve interference caused by the subluxations. The chiropractor proceeded to adjust Mr. Brown's ribs, and Mr. Brown was able to ride in the horse race just a few days later. The chiropractor is a true unsung hero of the story (the doctor's name is not even mentioned in the newspaper accounts of the event). Mr. Brown went on to win the prestigious race, and the rest, as they say, is history. |
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DisclaimerUnless otherwise attributed, all content is written by Kyle Johnson, DC, of Johnson Family Chiropractic of Peoria.
All images used are under Creative Commons license. Although every effort has been made to provide an accurate description of our chiropractic care and its benefits, the information given on this website and blog is not intended to be, nor should it be interpreted as, medical advice for any condition. If you have any questions regarding your condition, you should seek the help of Dr. Johnson in person, so that he may properly assess your condition. This blog is provided by Johnson Family Chiropractic of Peoria, S.C., proudly located in Peoria, IL. |