WELLNESS

By Dr. Aaron Dutruch D.C. Heart Health and Exercise Heart Health and Exercise

BY NOW EVERYONE KNOWS THAT EXERCISE IS IMPORTANT, IN THIS ARTICLE I’M GOING TO DISCUSS HOW EXERCISE AFFECTS THE HEALTH OF YOUR HEART. WE’LL BE COVERING BLOOD PRESSURE, CHOLESTEROL, AND BLOOD SUGARS.

Blood Pressure

Simply put, your blood pressure is a measure of how hard your heart is working. The greater your blood pressure, the more work your heart is doing to pump blood throughout your body. Exercise can help to reduce blood pressure in two main ways. Consistent exercise improves your hearts overall endurance making it a more efficient pump and allowing it to move blood better. Exercise is also an integral part of maintaining a healthy weight, in terms of blood pressure and heart health, being at a healthier weight decreases the amount of material your heart has to pump blood to, which decreases the workload for your heart.

Cholesterol

Cholesterol has many functions within our bodies, for example, it is used in hormone production, building and maintaining cell walls, aids in digestion through the production of bile acids and in the natural production of vitamin D. But too much of the “wrong” type of cholesterol (LDL, low-density lipoprotein) can have an overall negative effect on cardiovascular health. This type of cholesterol tends to be “sticky” and can get stuck in the arteries and blood vessels throughout the body including the blood vessels that feed the heart. These deposits over time, can cause blockages and lead to a heart attack. Endurance exercise has been shown to both decrease LDL and increase HDL (high-density lipoprotein) or the “good” cholesterol. The increased HDL circulating in your bloodstream can help to clean up deposits of LDL allowing blood to flow and your heart to work more efficiently

Blood Sugars

Every time we eat food our bodies break those foods down to their base components; sugar is one of those components. Those sugars get processed by the liver and circulated through the bloodstream for use by all the cells of our body. If our sugar levels remain elevated for a long period of time, it begins to impair our body’s ability to use those sugars which can lead to Type 2 Diabetes. High blood sugars can also damage the nerves and blood vessels throughout our body including those of the heart. Compounding some of the other conditions that diabetics often have (i.e., peripheral neuropathy, increased risk for infection). Exercise is an effective way to lower your blood sugar. It does this by increasing the “need” for sugar (glucose) in our cells. This increased need makes it easier for insulin to do its job and allow glucose into the cells, lowering the glucose within the bloodstream.

Exercise

The current recommendations by the CDC (www.cdc.gov) for physical activity for American adults is 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity each week. You can break that however you want, for example, you can do about 22 minutes each day or 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week. You could also increase the intensity of the exercise and save some time. The key is to just get started. Not everyone is going to be able to complete a full 30 minutes of exercise their first time trying, but if you work a little each day you can still reach the recommended amount. Don’t be discouraged if you get tired quickly when you first start. Keep trying, and you’ll be surprised how fast your body adapts. Just keep working toward a better heart and a better you!

Dr. Aaron Dutruch D. C. received his BS in Kinesiology, Fitness and Human Performance from LSU and his Doctorate of Chiropractic from Texas Chiropractic College. He is proficient in Upper Cervical chiropractic care and is a certified FAKTR provider.

Personal Values Versus Moral Values

IS RIGHT AND WRONG A PERSONAL CHOICE?

By Colleen Doyle Bryant

In today’s culture, some people argue that deciding what is right and wrong is a personal choice. They may argue that it’s up to each individual to define their moral compass and that it’s not the place of societies, schools, or even parents to dictate a shared moral order. Recently, personal values tests have been popping up around the internet reinforcing this idea. The tests present a list of “values” and encourage people to pick any five values that resonate with them, and then to use those personal preferences to guide life choices and moral decisions. If it’s valuable to you, then it can be a guiding value for how you live your life, or so the story goes.

While it can be helpful to clarify what we value in life, basing our moral compass on personal preferences doesn’t really work in the real world. Let’s use a simple scenario to illustrate why moral decisions can’t be based solely on the things we personally value. Imagine a movie where two characters are building their businesses. They both value wealth and professional success (which are two “values” that show up on personal values tests.) The first character in the movie builds their business honestly, respecting their employees, and treating others with fairness and integrity. The other character builds their business by destroying innocent people’s reputations, exploiting their workers and cheating their way to the top. Who is the villain in the movie? Did you think the character who acted with honesty, respect and fairness was the bad guy? Of course not, because we share a common moral order that says honesty, integrity and fairness are behaviors that we value as a society. Both characters personally valued the same qualities in life: wealth and success, but they each made decisions about how to live life and gain wealth with different moral values.

What this scenario shows us that there’s an important difference between “personal values” and moral values. In the way that personal values assessments are using the term, personal values are ways of living and experiencing life that bring you pleasure, satisfaction, or enhance the quality of your life. Some examples of personal values from these assessments are curiosity, creativity, autonomy, wealth and beauty. These are aspects of life that may motivate a person or bring them joy, but they aren’t actually values in the true sense of the word because real values are standards for behavior. Some examples of core moral values are honesty, respect, responsibility and compassion which represent ways of acting toward each other that help us to live and work together and ultimately enhance our well-being.

There’s nothing wrong with knowing what you value in life and using that to guide decisions about what you want to accomplish, what type of company you want to work for, or how you prioritize your leisure activities. In that sense, knowing your

personal values can help guide you toward fulfilling experiences. Yet no matter what your personal values are, the way you go about pursuing them should be built on a foundation of the moral values that we share as a society.

So if it’s not an individual choice, who decides which core moral values we share as a society? If we look back to where moral values came from, we would find that humans across thousands of years, all around the globe, developed very similar core moral codes. Despite differences in how people worship and their customs and cultures, four core values sit at the foundation of civilized life: truth, respect, responsibility and compassion. These values encompass more specific moral traits like being trustworthy and honest, treating others as we’d like to be treated, fairness, justice, goodwill, benevolence and forgiveness, to name a few. These core moral values are the basis for our laws, ethical practices, and they help each of us decide, throughout the course or our day, what the right and reasonable thing to do is, all with the overarching theme that acting morally helps our own well-being and the well-being of others.

Today, personal values are helping people pursue life in a way they find more fulfilling; but that self-focused approach only works when our personal values are built on top of the essential moral values that make social life possible. Each of us can be true to ourselves, yet we still need to live with other people too. That’s where moral values help us manage the way our actions impact other people.

Colleen Doyle Bryant is the author of five books and more than 50 learning resources about character and values. Her latest book, Rooted in Decency, looks at the decline in common decency in society and ways that we can build more trust and cooperation. Colleen’s Talking with Trees series for elementary students and Truth Be Told Quotes series for teens are used in curriculums around the world with more than 100,000 of her good values resources downloaded each year. Colleen has a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Duke University.