Foundations of Health

In a world filled with misinformation, consider Middle Path Medicine as your go-to source for unbiased healthcare information. What sets us apart from mainstream newsletters and integrative websites is our team of dedicated healthcare practitioners who not only research but also treat patients using the protocols found at Middle Path Medicine.

The following guidelines are intended to help you become your own best healer. As with all recommendations, it is your direct personal experiential knowingness of whatever healthcare practice you undertake that will guide you always in the direction of healing.

When it comes to guides on the healing path, MPM provides the only truly Integrative Wellness Center on the Central Coast of California. We apply integrative medicine because it is the optimal healthcare solution, aligning with our life vision.

Depending on the complexity of your visit, we may or may not have time to discuss the basics of healing—that is why they are covered in detail in this document. Whatever symptom, whatever 'dis-ease', or whatever disease you may have, symptoms are our guide to aid us in making the best decisions for our health. Your symptoms are your teachers! Just treating symptoms without learning the lesson behind the symptoms will almost always lead to more symptoms and then new diseases. Whenever you have a problem, especially one that has become chronic, ask yourself “why”? Not with guilt, blame, or shame, but with that uniquely human spirit of inquiry. Treating symptoms without treating the cause truly represents “shooting the messenger.” Symptom relief, although vital, often allows us to avoid inquiry and thus, knowingness.

Whatever the imbalance, the underlying problem usually lays within our diet, our exercise habits, and the all-encompassing world of stress. Happiness and health are cultivated actively within one’s own words and deeds and not through “happenstance” occurrence as our language would imply. To maintain health takes a minimum of three hours per day of proactively healthy behaviors and to regenerate health can take much more. Whatever recommendations that follow, practice them. Then you will feel the effects or the side-effects based upon your experiential knowingness, and therefore know whether the intervention is right for you. Don’t read about exercise, just exercise. Don’t read about supplements, take them and experience them. Learning to trust your body, mind, and spirit once again is the most powerful form of healing I know.

If you wish to read a good guideline, I suggest the book 'TRANSCEND' by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, MD. The book’s title is an acronym teaching the reader the different “lines of intelligence” we must be integrally aware of in our path to optimal health. The acronym, with my modifications, includes T: Talk with your integrative health care practitioner, R: Relaxation which I call Stress Management, see below, A: Assessment, measure everything you can! N: Nutrition, the Eat Real Food program, see below, S: supplements, see our Basic Nutritional Protocol, and use our website for authentic information on any supplement; S can also stand for Sleep and Sex—two areas of health awareness that people do not pay enough attention to, C: Calorie Restriction, E: Exercise, see below, N: New technologies such as genomics and evolving healthy “apps” for our electronic devices, and finally D: Detoxification, the regular practice of detoxification at least three times per year. By following this acronym, you have a template of “lines of intelligence” directing which area in your life might need the most attention in your path to optimal wellness.

Stress Management: This all-encompassing subject includes the quality of our relationships, our vocations and avocations, our spiritual outlook, our cultural conditioning, and generally anything which affects our “point of view”. Our "Stress Management Series" is the single most important series of articles you can read, re-read, and most importantly, practice. Stress is the single greatest cause of the “dis-ease” which precedes disease in human kind. Furthermore stress exacerbates absolutely everything. Not having a fully-developed stress management strategy is, by far, the single greatest cause for failure in your quest for health, happiness, and freedom. Yet it is, tragically, by far, the most neglected health care practice in the individual’s and society’s quest for health, for peace.

Exercise: Average seven hours per week of exercise. In my practice, one of the leading reasons for healthy aging is the incorporation of a regular exercise practice. The health benefits are myriad and the research unequivocal. We need more exercise. There are three types of fitness, each with equal yet unique and inter-related benefits.

• “Yogic” Fitness: the regular practice of yoga, tai chi, qi-gong or good old American stretching every day improves flexibility both mentally and physically, prevents cramping, improves balance, core strength, and allows one to maintain an exercise routine by preventing injury. The more exercise we practice, the more stretching we need. This especially applies as we grow older. Most of the daily aches and pains we experience can be prevented through a regular stretching program.
• Aerobic Fitness: the best form of exercise is the one you will do. Develop a schedule and stick to it. Ally with a friend, health-coach or trainer to help you maintain your program through the inevitable difficult times. In a world filled with people trying to improve their oxygenation through supplements, I find it paradoxical that the only proven methods, aerobic exercise, most of us don’t incorporate regularly. Interval training where one exercises vigorously for even 2-5 minutes with 5 minute walking intervals for at least three cycles has been shown to vastly improve calorie burning over more monotonous routines.
• Resistance Training Fitness: Weight bearing activity is essential for everyone. Especially as we age, the loss of lean body mass is one of the primary markers of poor aging. Whether through going to the gym, home exercise equipment, or just carrying some weights while walking, we will not maintain vitality without incorporating some form of resistance training into our weekly schedule.

Daily activity of course has a significant impact on physical capacity. Wearing a pedometer and ensuring that you take 10,000 steps per day is yet another way to improve your vitality. Our bodies crave regular activity. You will find any health condition can improve with specific exercise guided by your physician or health coach.

Nutrition: Let’s cover what we do know about nutrition. Remember, “Everything in moderation, especially moderation!”

The orienting generalizations:

• Eating Awareness: learn to trust yourself again, not some supposed authority. Eat slowly, quietly, thoroughly and with great enjoyment. Whatever the food, if you find your body reacting negatively, stop at that moment. If you eat slowly, you will eat less. I find people so confused whether they should or shouldn’t eat meat, combine certain foods—basically anything—and somehow think someone on the TV or even I can tell them how to eat. Only you can. If you have any digestive health issues please go to our presentation Digestive Difficulties.
• Eat Less: The most common nutritional problem in America is overeating. Whether it is proteins, fats or carbs, we eat too much, period. The natural medicine saying, “My mouth is my juicer” means chewing your food thoroughly will help you enjoy your food more and eat less. Juicing is a form of processing and is appropriate for treating some conditions, however it is a prime cause for obesity when one gulps 24 ounces of any fruit juice.
• Drink More Water: Drink a minimum of 8, eight-ounce glasses of filtered water per day. Allow yourself some herbal teas, try squeezing some lemon or lime into your water, or experience a myriad of different mineral waters. The primary cause of weight gain is liquid calories, whether it is from sodas, juices, or even diet sodas, which fool the body and increase appetite.
• Eat More Whole Foods: The best nutritional system would be the advice to eat the way we did prior to the advent of processed foods. If it comes in a box or a wrapper, eat as little of it as you can. Eat a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, preferably locally grown and organic. Get in the habit of shopping regularly, preparing fresh food that you buy and consume every few days. Remove sugars and anything with an ingredient list from your diet.
• Eat More Good Fats: The low-fat diet lead directly to the consumption of more processed carbohydrates and the burgeoning obesity and diabetes epidemic. The misconception that fats are bad for you amazingly persists, especially with the physicians in our society. Healthy fats that come from fish, organically-raised meats, organic whole-fat (preferably raw) dairy, nuts, olive oil, coconut oil, avocados prevent heart disease, not cause it!
• The 80/20 Rule: Whatever system of nutrition that you apply in your life, allow yourself “cheats.” If you can stay 80% on your program and 20% “cheat”, you will stick with it for the long-term. Any system of nutrition focused on what you can’t do, will never work. Also note that any system that relies on you counting anything, whether calories or grams of anything, has never worked long-term.
• Avoiding the Artificial: If you are thinking of eating anything man-made that is substituting for something found in nature, it will always be worse than what you are substituting for. Specifically, margarine is 10 times worse for you than butter, non-dairy (vegetable oil based) creamer may be the vilest substance ever made, and artificial sweeteners are always worse than natural sweeteners. In fact, consumption of artificial sweeteners is associated with weight gain. Since people eat sugar substitutes solely to lose weight, there can’t possibly be any benefit to them, so why do we still consume them?
• Coffee: Listen to your body. If drinking coffee makes you irritable, stop drinking it. However, avoiding coffee because it is perceived as “bad” is directly controverted by medical research. Coffee in moderation (1-4 cups per day) helps prevent diabetes, Parkinson’s, liver disease, has many powerful antioxidants, and has never been proven to cause any illness.
• Alcohol: If you have an alcohol problem, stop drinking altogether. However, drinking 5-7 alcoholic drinks per week has been shown to lead to a 40% reduction in heart disease, stroke, and dementia, and is also associated with a lower risk of certain cancers. I believe the idea that eliminating alcohol and coffee found so common in “natural health books” truly is a reflection of our country’s Puritanical heritage. Most people suspect that if it feels good, it has to be bad for you. Disease comes from thinking that more is better, however. Always listen to your body. If you don’t feel well after drinking alcohol, stop drinking - everything in moderation.
• Silent Killers: The flavor enhancer MSG is hidden in so many foods and acts as an excitotoxin causing brain damage. Hydrogenated (partially or otherwise) oils, trans fatty acids, kills between 50,000 to 100,000 Americans per year, each and every year, yet our FDA allows them to be part of our food. Read food labels carefully. Our misguided public gets scared by the FDA and pharmaceutical industry into fearing herbs and vitamins while allowing for these kinds of atrocities.
• “Primal Principles”: 'See Is Gluten-Free The Way To Be? The Primal Blueprint' is the best book discussing “Paleo” diets. The principles actually cannot be wrong, and you rarely hear me say this.

- Eat Real Food, avoid man-made packaged foods and cut out sugar.

- Eat no grain of any kind. The glutens and gluten-like peptides of other grains are true toxins that, like cigarette smoke, cannot be recommended at any dosage. The direct damage to your gastrointestinal tract and then to the rest of your body from grains make them the leading killer in our society. The carbohydrate load alone is toxic for most.

- Eat no beans, the form of lectins fond in beans with their inherent carb load make them sub-optimal food choices. Check out our article, “Well, What Can I Eat?”.

Caveats: over the last 12,000 years some populations have adapted to their most prevalent grains. Like any toxin, some people just seem to handle these toxic substances better than others (think George Burns and cigars). Sprouting grains and soaking beans minimize their toxicity. My recommendation to my patients is to follow the Primal Diet perfectly for three weeks and listen to their body. After the first week of detox, nearly 95% of people notice an enormous improvement in something. Aches go away, sinuses clear, brain fog clears, digestion dramatically improves, weight loss occurs, sexual function returns, almost anything, but now they have a “New Baseline” from which to proceed now that they have cleared the slate. Next I ask them to individualize. Start introducing a new food every 4 days to see how they react. If they miss oatmeal, they introduce oatmeal and now listen to their own body as to whether oatmeal is good for them! Eventually every person can Eat Real Food, and if they listen to themselves and turn primarily carnivore or vegan is solely based on how they “run best”. And that is why following the Primal Principles cannot be wrong. Each individual finds their own nutritional truth!

Eat slowly and enjoy your foods. Experience and stop thinking so much!

I know that the principle of three hours per day (an hour per day for self-realization/stress-reduction, exercise, and nutrition) of proactively healthy behaviors may seem a daunting task. I could argue that if happiness and health is your primary purpose in life, then whatever time you do spend will be well worth it.

- Gary E. Foresman, MD