LIVING WELL: HOW TO LIVE HEALTHY THROUGH THE 21ST CENTURY

Dr.DerekBerryThorpe

From the beginning of January 2023 I’ve had a score of clients ask me about the best design for living well and healthy. It’s a fabulous question to ask of a health professional. It shows that the bearer of the question is actively curious of their mortality and how to preserve vitality. Sadly, the timing of the question is not always ideal for a purposeful answer… as the other patrons in the darkened movie theater can attest.

The objective of this edition is to offer the reader a general blueprint or map for a healthy lifestyle. Steppingstones, if you will, encompassing broad strokes of the different components that lead you to this destination. Each area of advice could be expanded upon by many paragraphs alone so it’s up to the reader’s curiosity to fine tune their precise pathway.

There are two great considerations right off the bat; things to run away from, and the other, things to run toward. Achieving only one of these will not be enough to get you through the gates of healthy living.

There are some obvious entities in the ‘things to run away from’ category. For example, don’t drink poison, don’t run into speeding highway traffic, don’t smoke, stay away from ionizing radiation. These are selfexplanatory and not compatible with healthy living. However, there are a few not so obvious ones that need highlighting.

As best as possible, stay away from low grade chronic inflammation. Identify and avoid the most common culprit, which are the processed cooking seed oils. Switch to olive, avocado or coconut oils.

Although you must have heard this before, it bears repeating. Sugars, especially highly processed sugars containing high fructose corn syrup need to be avoided. The problem is the food industry are magicians in trying to disguise this ingredient on their packaging. Ninety percent of those packaged breakfast cereals and many of the store-bought fruit juices and sodas are chock full of fructose and need to be shunned, especially if you’re a hypertensive or diabetic.

My opinion on salt is complex and evolving and I’ll NOT advise you to stay away from salt at this time, especially if you’re following a well formulated ketogenic diet. Suffice to say, if you happen to eat a salty meal, drink lots of water during and after the meal.

The same is true for fats and cholesterol. Lipidology is a complicated quagmire of shifting guidelines, but I will NOT steer you away from healthy fats (medium chain triglycerides) or cholesterol containing foods. Cholesterol is an absolutely vital molecule without which cellular metabolism is impossible. Although there is a relationship between cholesterol and the lipoproteins HDL and LDL, there are not the same thing and should not be confused with each other.

This is not an exhaustive list on the ‘run away from’ items. But I’ll close with a sneaky unexpected one; Avoid being a harbour for hate and sour discontent. The anxiety generated sets up for high cortisol release and crowds out room for the emotion of gratitude. More on this below.

“There’s more of them than there are of us.”

Sounds like a line from the ‘Walking Dead’ series, but I’m actually referring to the bacteria within our gut verses our regular skin, muscle or organ cells. There are far more bacteria comprising our gut biome without which we cannot survive, as they are essential for digestion and absorption of nutrients. As a functional physician, I am fascinated by how and why things work at the cellular level, and by extension, why they fail to work. I promise I’ll only wade ankle deep into the science but skip with me into this pool of ‘things to run towards’.

In this 21st Century, we need to be aware of these vital passengers we carry around. Not all gut bacteria are created equal, but we do have a say in the quality of the neighborhood populations we cultivate. There is another supremely important set of ‘former’ bacteria that control our very existence we need to be aware of. They are the mighty mitochondria. Each of our cells contain anywhere between 50 and 5,000 depending on the activity of the cell. Fingernail cell…not so many. Cardiac cell…plenty. Mitochondria are responsible for converting food energy (glucose) into chemical energy (ATP) that our bodies need every second.

The point I’m trying to get at is the quantity and quality of these subcellular organelles and our gut bacteria are directly responsible for whether we have disease or not. This is not an exaggeration. The more time we spend actively cultivating our own army of strong, upstanding bacterial and mitochondrial species, the longer we live disease free. Bottom line, if we’re good to them, they will repay us with actual leaps and bounds.

So, we should run to feed our gut biome with prebiotic fiber and probiotics. We should not take unnecessary antibiotics for every sniffle we get which indiscriminately kills off our gut friends. We should eat less processed sugars which starves out the less desirable gut flora. We should fast regularly and exercise often to facilitate the multiplication and efficiency of our mitochondria.

As we’re on the topic of exercise, we should run or ride or swim in this direction repeatedly. This is not a new concept, but the benefits of exercise are too numerous to mention and outside the scope of this article. Exercise is so vital to our longevity that even if we took the most appropriate supplements recommended, it will make little difference if our exercise house is not in order.

So, what should we eat? In broad strokes, we should eat a plant-based diet full of fresh colorful cruciferous vegetables. We should choose our fruit wisely with respect to the sugar and fiber content. The single best non citrus fruit is the avocado, and the best citrus fruits are those that end in the word ‘berry’. We should eat meat from animals that have been grass fed or grass finished and fish, high in omega-3 oils. We should imagine any excuse to get olive oil into our mouths and not be afraid of eggs. We should also not be afraid of butter or healthy fats and strive for a low carbohydrate existence.

Eating healthy morsels of food is great, but what one can do to distinguish yourself from the next food conscious person is appreciating that timing of meals matter. Resist the urge to put anything solid into your stomach as soon as you wake. Extend your overnight fast to as close to midday as possible. Keep your feeding window to within 4-6 hours then simply stop eating. It’s difficult but like any athlete in training it takes practice. The less you ask your pancreas to secrete insulin by eating a meal, the better off you are. The combination of intermittent fasting and caloric restriction is an insanely powerful health tool at your disposal that’s free of cost.

Healthy Experience For A Rich Outcome

Finally treat yourself to what I call, a H.E.R.O. morning. In an ideal world one would wake from a blissful night’s sleep of at least 7 hours (Brain Health). Nothing solid to eat yet but do drink a cup of Matcha green tea (EGCG cancer protection) or coffee (Polyphenols) and walk briskly to the beach via a grassy track or forest, touching the tree barks and the tall grass (Nature for the soul). Take off your shoes and shirt and walk barefoot on the wet sand (Grounding) allowing the sunshine to embrace you (Vitamin D). After a while break into a jog where you sweat and get out of breath. Plunge yourself into the cold ocean and co-mingle with your group of friends. Receive love and give love, laugh, swim and frolic. Then sit on the beach and go into a state of quiet mindfulness where you express gratitude for life and plan how you will apply your talents throughout the day. This sequence of events will also offer tremendous benefits for the emotional repair needed for that feeling of well-being and encourage hormonal rebalancing.

I hope this article has made the reader curious enough to conduct their own research and we’ll share again soon.

Dr. Derek B Thorpe is a Nuclear Medicine and Functional Medicine Physician with postgraduate degrees from Cornell School of Medicine and the University of Florida. He mentors clients through the ketogenic diet and treats pain and injury through optimizationofbloodflow.mongo505@hotmail.com