How Food Impacts Arthritis and Chronic Pain | Chef AJ LIVE! with Eileen Kopsaftis

absolutely are hey everyone and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about my guest today is eileen kubsoftis and she is going to be talking about how food impacts arthritis except she's gone she was here a minute ago so maybe i can hold down the fort ah there she is okay that was scary oh please come back yay are you back eileen i see it in the waiting room let's ask to start video ask to unmute this doesn't usually happen at the top of the show is mercury in retrograde any of you astrologically minded people know i see her in the waiting room i swear she was here before we started and this is a topic i know nothing about uh oh spaghettios well just say hello to people in the chat till she can get on hello jl karen angela nim debbie stacy melissa the usual suspects oh darn why did this have to i i i have her phone you guys want to talk about something until until she joins us because or i could just stop the broadcast and go back on which i don't like to do when there's so many of you here she was here we were talking how was everybody's weekend okay i finally got unmuted oh my god there we go you gave me a heart i'm just hitting my clicker 50 000 miles a minute and it just wasn't turning anything on i'm so glad you're confused i'm so glad you're back because this isn't a topic i know anything about so we're gonna need you for this one for sure how you doing eileen i know i know it's really stressful when technology doesn't work i know i said i know you have a bunch of people watching and i don't want to disappoint anybody so well you won't so i know you have a presentation for us and if you'd like you can start it right away or if you just want to spend a few minutes just telling people who you are what you do and how you found out about plant-based world all right well i will start with that it might help me calm down a little before i hit my slides and pray all the buttons work now um yeah i've been uh helping people get out of pain now for about 27 years and uh it's funny because when i was a kid i wanted to be a doctor and then when i got older i realized i wasn't in love with the medical model of treating symptoms i i have the utmost respect for physicians anybody who goes to school for 12 years to help people is a really good person um it's just the medical models not my favorite so i ended up wanting to go into nutrition but i didn't necessarily agree with they were teaching the four food groups at the time i'm showing my age now and uh and so i ended up becoming a pt but then fast forward i ended up getting a diploma in nutrition education so now i use this four prong approach to help people get out of pain i've been helping people over zoom now for years long before the world shut down and um while a lot of my skills are in manual work my favorite thing to do is to teach people how to fix themselves i want to empower people right teach a person to fish and so and food is a huge huge piece of that and most people don't understand that i would have people come into the clinic who were in pain from head to toe and uh and unless we addressed what they were putting in their mouth we were just going to be chasing our tails trying to get them out of pain so so that's why i put this together and hopefully um it will help people yeah i know very few doctors address what goes in yes yes but our favorites do right that's right well medicine dr barnard and dr esselstyn and yeah i could go on and on but plant-based doctors but a lot that goes on like you know when you see physical therapists which are wonderful i go all the time for different things they don't address the root cause of why the back hurts so much because the vessels are you know that almost never comes up yes yes yes absolutely so all right i'm gonna share my screen and hope these buttons work today here we are how's that is that working perfect all right excellent so um i really do want to share with everybody uh you know i do have contact information i did provide a um free chapter from my book for people who want to learn a little bit more about what it is that i do so that nobody has to buy anything they can just check it out and um and anybody who wants to you know go anywhere or contact me sometimes people watch this as you said they watch it recorded they won't be here live and they might think of a question i'll do my best to answer the questions i get obviously i can't diagnose anybody or treat them over an email but i'll try to provide general resources that'll be helpful so all right so i want to talk about pain today i'm going to specify it as in relationship to food obviously i could go on and on about different things but this is one of my favorite statements um that i make to people i think everybody needs to be informed it definitely helps them to make better choices and have much more improved outcomes and so that's what this is about is informing people so i'm going to spend just about two minutes on some data just so people understand how impactful this topic is the national institutes of health tells us that pain affects more americans and most of the western world actually than the top three diseases combined these are the top three diseases that affect human misery and mortality and pain effects more than that it is the number one reason to seek medical care and a lot of people are unaware but the top 10 reasons people goes to a doctor seven of them have to do with pain the other three are a post-surgical follow-up updating medications and checkup the rest are all having to do with pain and then it's a very expensive issue right it's over 100 billion dollars a year so you think we'd be pretty good at addressing it if that's the amount of money we're spending unfortunately that's not the case one in three people currently have had chronic pain um uh sorry two-thirds of those people for more than five years so a lot of people are suffering and currently 100 million people just in this country alone are living with chronic pain uh just a couple more slides on data i don't want people's eyes to glaze over so um american pain society it's kind of sad that we have something called the american pain society but they tell us that it's the second leading cause of loss of work right pain uh national sleep foundation tells us that one in three people loses more than 20 hours of sleep a month due to chronic pain and you know pain is very fatiguing even when you're awake it drains your energy and and it's very hard to function when you're dealing with pain when it comes to back pain 8 out of 10 people will have back pain at some point in time in their life and more than half of that hundred billion spent on pain every year is spent on back pain alone and we're not very successful in treating it generally speaking people are living with pain so moving into to the actual damage and injury that occurs to the body we're going to talk about joint pain and the centers for disease control and prevention tells us that one third to one half of this country's population and again we can translate this to a great deal of the western world develops degenerative joint disease or osteoarthritis and oa is the leading cause of chronic disability in the us it's the leading cause so it seems to me it's a really good idea to figure out why is this happening can we prevent it can we reverse it what can we do about it right so it's it's joint damage and and i put a little picture up here just to give people an idea you can see the picture on the left that's normal that's articular cartilage articular cartilage does not have any nerve endings in it so if the joint is malaligned and it's rubbing you won't feel any pain but once that articular cartilage is rubbed away bone is very highly innervated and so that's where that bone on bone pain happens but as you can see the degenerative joint is very inflamed it's the inflammation that does the damage to the cartilage and to the bone so somebody had the bright idea of doing a study at stanford university school of medicine and they wanted to determine what is the primary cause of joint damage and they determined that it is not compression it's not wear and tear and and i used to say this to my patients because you know they would come in and they would say you know they'd have a maybe they had a joint replacement in the right knee and i would say well how is your left knee and they'd say oh it's fine you know it's you know but the reason they told me they had the joint replacement is because the joint was worn out you know they're older maybe they're in their 70s uh even 80s uh and i tell them i go well were you hopping around on one leg your whole life how come only one knee wore out why didn't both knees wear out doesn't make sense to me right if it's age or compression so the stanford university school of medicine did this study and this is what they determined was the primary cause of joint damage chronic inflammation and so if it's chronic inflammation then it's not compression or wear and tear right and so i did a lot of research i created an obesity and pain course um for food choices academy and i spent months and months buried in research but what we find is the number one cause of chronic inflammation and i'm even adding impaired circulation here is the standard american diet i mean we are putting things into our mouth that promote this and i know we don't have a lot of time today so i'm limited in how much information i'm sharing here but i i tried to do my best to get the most important points here so many of us are confused right because we're told how many of you have gone to the doctor and they tell you oh you are getting older you know well at your age it's expected you know there's nothing we can do about it you're going to just need to learn to live with it or you know take this medication or maybe have this procedure or this surgical um intervention but but it's you know most of us are confused and especially now that i just said it's not wear and tear or old age right so these are some common inflammatory conditions and you may be surprised to see that the specifically muscular low back pain and muscular neck pain here because these are can be inflammatory conditions now it's not always the case someone can fall and end up with a posterior sacral torsion or they could end up with um you know a lack of function in their power source which is the glutes that's your power source believe it or not your glutes are what you're using to push open a heavy door to get out of a chair to bend over and and lift something out of the trunk of the car and a lot of us are sitting on our glutes all the time now right so they weaken they get flaccid they atrophy and people lose strength and then that creates chronic pain but but these can be inflammatory conditions and it's important for people to understand that because if you're doing all the right things except how you're nourishing your body this may be your answer if you're struggling with chronic pain so here's some of the common symptoms of inflammation and none of this is a surprise to anyone right redness swollen joints pain stiffness but generalized pain and muscular pain can be symptoms of inflammation uh most of us are familiar with the stiffness part especially if it's osteoarthritis very commonly when someone's been sitting for a while and they get up they feel stiff and they have to move around a little bit before they feel better or when they get up in the morning they feel very stiff and they have to move around for a while well that stiffness may or may not be osteoarthritic in nature i mean there are some other things that can do that we can have a a fascial dehydrated compressed uh area of the body and treating the fascia can can eliminate that stiffness it can be that a muscle has kind of locked short because we're sitting so much the front hip muscles can lock short and they're not used to getting longer and stabilizing us when we stand up so they have to kind of oh you're going to make me get longer now and so you'll feel the stiffness there so there are other reasons i don't want anyone to think this is the only one but this is one most people don't think about and so that's why i wanted to share this today so uh i'm gonna share three causes of chronic pain when it comes to the topic i'm presenting here today one is food and inflammation the other is excess weight and inflammation and the third is food and impaired circulation so the first question to ask is how does food promote chronic inflammation and i'm going to go into this not in a great deal of detail i i don't want to you know just slam a whole bunch of studies at people but i did um provide a few on each of these questions so the biggest reason that food can promote pain in the body is because animal foods specifically contain high amounts of arachidonic acid and i'm sure you're familiar with all of this aj um but but i'm trying to present this in a way where people see it as a pain issue right so arachidonic acid is an inflammatory omega-6 fatty acid it stim stimulates the production of pro-inflammatory chemicals so it's promoting inflammation in the body and when you get too much arachidonic acid it leads the body to over respond with inflammation during the normal healing and repair process our body is is healing and repairing on a cellular level pretty much 24 7. right we've all heard that you know you're a whole new body every six or seven years because all the cells are are not the same ones you had a long time ago but but the point is is that it's supposed to shunt it's supposed to kind of turn off or reverse and if we're overloaded with arachidonic acid from our food supply from what we're eating that that doesn't happen it gets stuck on it's like putting a brick on the gas pedal it just gets overloaded and and that inflammatory process just does not shunt or reverse so arachidonic acid is important um but we don't need to be consuming it directly it can be converted as needed from the linoleic acid from plant oils so if you're eating a whole food plant-based diet you're going to get everything you need for your body to make the amount of arachidonic acid that it needs at the time so it's not going to be struggling with an oversupply it's not going to make more than it needs it's not going to convert more than it needs or people are getting it directly from meat poultry fish eggs seafood uh dairy all of the animal food sources now um this this is an interesting fact and and i know that you've had um dr michael greger on your your show many times and this was from his website efficientnutritionfacts.org but the amount of arachidonic acid found in just one egg a day elevates arachidonic acid levels in the bloodstream so it doesn't take much for us to get an oversupply of arachidonic acid which will lead to promoting that chronic inflammation which will lead to joint damage and then according to the usda standard 13 and 16 databases meat poultry egg seafood fish including salmon and many people believe salmon is this magic health food because of the omega-3 in it it does have a lot of the six which is is arachidonic acid directly these foods produce the highest amounts in the body fruits veggies grains legumes beans lentils produce little or no arachidonic acid in the body and processed baked goods produce a moderate amount and this is the interesting part i'm guessing no matter what side of the fence people sit on when it comes to diet whether they're palio atkins vegan whatever i think everybody can agree on this one point i've never heard anybody write a book with a title that says eat donuts for health right everybody knows that baked goods are not good for us so we can all agree on something so and of course i had to put this in there what about protein because everybody says well if we can't eat all the animal foods where are we getting our protein and i i just put this very tiny little chart here you can see all of these beautiful foods on the left are very high in protein and and so it's not and and i didn't want to get off on a tangent obviously you know people think of the complete protein an incomplete protein right or superior and inferior protein and it's just because of all the amino acids in the animal foods and only some of them in plant foods but we know that you get all you need you just need to eat a variety of plants and they don't have to all be consumed at the same time so nobody's ever and i've heard dr mcdougall say this many times no one has ever been diagnosed with a protein deficiency as long as they're consuming enough calories so uh we know that that can't happen okay here's the second question how does excess weight promote chronic inflammation and this is this can be a little bit of a touchy subject you know this isn't about me picking on people who are carrying excess weight this is explaining why um specifically excess weight and obesity tends to coincide with chronic pain in people's bodies fat cells produce inflammatory cytokines and i remember listening to um an expert many years ago who this was before we knew this stuff because we've learned a lot in the last 20 years but 20 years ago this person was saying that if you looked at a fat cell in a microscope under a microscope it would just stare back at you it does nothing right so it doesn't burn any calories it doesn't require any caloric intake to maintain itself that was his point and then he said if you stare at a muscle cell under the microscope it's like the fourth of july there's so much energy being used in that muscle cell it requires a caloric intake to maintain itself right so that was his point but we've learned in the last 20 years that fat cells do not just lay there and do nothing they do produce inflammatory cytokines they do promote chronic inflammation in the body which tends to do more damage to joints and create chronic pain and those inflammatory cytokines they're little proteins they're like messengers between the cells they go back and forth kind of telling each other what's going on and what to do they trigger things they'll bind to target immune cells triggering the immune response and the immune response is inflammation right and so if we have excess of these cytokines it can lead to inflammation and tissue destruction so i'm going to go over just a few studies here on some of this just to to show you this isn't just my opinion this is being seen in the data so when it comes to excess weight and pain there is a definite association between joint pain and obesity and there's lots and lots of studies like i said i spent months researching this topic um many studies indicate that obesity is related to not just the fact the person is experiencing osteoarthritis but it's also related to how much it progresses how fast it progresses and how severe it gets those with a bmi of 40 or higher have 33 times higher risk of a total hip replacement and a nine times higher risk of a total knee replacement than those who are not obese so we're seeing this in the literature and there's tons of it and i'm only presenting a few studies here uh i did want to put this in here mainly because um there there are people who are sharing the information and it's great information that improved cartilage thickness is seen from walking and weight-bearing activity but this is not seen in the obese population so i wanted to put this out there because i think it's important to protect people from making wrong decisions right from lack of information so exercise choices are important if you're carrying exercise weight so it's really important to do non-impact aerobic work right like bicycling or something uh to to improve cardiovascular fitness and all of the other benefits but also to burn body fat and and to help with uh normalizing weight but minimizing the joint stress and then once the weight is lost then the weight bearing can occur um to help improve that cartilage thickness so um back to weight loss so the framingham study which is a huge study uh went on for decades um it showed the risk of developing knee osteoarthritis was reduced by half when weight loss of just five kilograms which i think would uh a pound is 2.2 kilograms i think so we're only looking at about 12 pound weight loss um when that occurred in the 10 years prior to the assessment so you can really reduce your risk of osteoarthritis with weight loss and there's tons of studies i'm just going to show a couple here um those who lost at least 10 percent of their body weight had improved levels of pain and better function and 10 you know that's not a huge that's not you know 200 pounds they had to lose um those who engaged in both exercise and better diet had better outcomes so obviously exercise is important right we've got to get moving a lot of people are in pain just because they're not moving motion is lotion i love to say and when you just sit still forever you're going to be stiff and sore no matter what you eat you've got to be moving but the more weight that was lost they had less inflammation more mobility faster walking speed improved health-related quality of life so lots of good things for those who did both exercise and better diet um but the weight loss it's dose dependent as far as how people felt the more weight people lost the better they felt um those who lost 10 percent of body weight showed more improvement than those who lost between 5 and 10 and those did better than those who lost only 5 so so the more loss the better the results and then i want to talk a little bit about just food and i and i could again share lots of studies but this one i think is a good one to share here um this looked at over 6 000 americans in two different studies um it was the osteoarthritis initiative of almost 5000 was like about 4 800 people and then the framingham offspring osteoarthritis study which included over 1200 people and they followed them every single year um the osteoarthritis initiative they followed for four years uh the framingham they followed for nine years and what they found was those who ate more fiber and i'm pretty sure everybody who watches your show knows that fiber is only in plants animal foods do not have any fiber not a stitch and so the the top consumers had a 61 percent lower chance of symptomatic osteoarthritis now i i need to explain you can see roa when they took the results of the imaging and then the sx is the symptoms they were experiencing and reporting so the people who ate more fiber had a much lower chance of symptoms for their osteoarthritis now the interesting part is the relationship with the imaging was unclear now these were just people eating more fiber it didn't say anything about their animal food intake uh it didn't say anything you know about those other things were they consuming a lot of oils were they doing things to impair circulation we don't know we only know that they were eating more fiber and that did lessen their symptoms dramatically okay the second question i want to look at is how does food or i think this might be the third one i lost track how does food impair blood supply and so fat and cholesterol consumption is known well known to impair circulation in the body and many people are being told you know to pour that olive oil all over their food because of the omega 3 benefits but that's less than accurate and i'm going to show some studies about that but we'll start off with food that people know for sure is loaded with fat and cholesterol a single meal of sausage and eggs can literally stick the blood cells together leading to less than optimal blood flow and oxygenation of the tissues so this picture here these are red blood cells floating around in the blood and and looking good single file anybody who knows anything about anatomy knows that your smallest blood vessel that supplies things to the tissues like nutrition and oxygen is the capillary and the capillary is only one cell wall thick very very tiny and so the red blood cells can only go through single file and uh for some time i taught anatomy and physiology to third and fourth graders and had a ball doing it and i would have them line up like they were the capillary and then the other kids holding the red construction paper they were the red blood cells and they could only go through one at a time single file so what happens you can see these red blood cells on the right they're all clumped together what happens if they're all clumped together it's going to impair circulation they're going to really struggle getting through the capillaries to provide what's needed to the body on a cellular level so it's really going to impair your circulation right so i i like to show pictures because pictures are worth a thousand words and this is just the blood supply to the spine people don't realize just how vascular their spine is and i know we all get concerned about impaired circulation when it comes to heart attacks and strokes we want to protect our heart we want to protect our brain very important organs but your whole body requires a good blood supply and the spine is no different than the brain and the heart i mean they need your spine needs a really good blood supply and so what happens is uh one of my favorite researchers and and i got to i actually went to um one of the pcrm conferences in washington well i've been to several of them but um the one that was in 2015 uh because the title of it was cardiovascular disease um was the title of the conference and dr lina kapila from finland was doing a presentation called um i believe her presentation was back pain and cardiovascular disease i i might be slaughtering the title but i was fascinated with that and i had to go and i know you've been there aj to their conferences and you know just how heavily attended they are well it was it was just this you know god was smiling on me i ended up sitting right behind dr capilla and i didn't even know it and she went up to do her presentation and came back and i was able to have a conversation with her but i'm only going to share one of her studies but i could paper the wall in my office with how many studies the woman has has published she's just prolific in her research in this one study what she showed was the subjects had atherosclerosis so they were showing heart disease or cardiovascular disease by the age of 10 years old now that's pretty sad and she was seeing 10 advanced blockages by the age of 20. that's just in this one study and what she found was these blockages were happening at the opening of the lumbar arteries which are the blood vessels that supply blood to the lumbar spine and what she saw in this particular study was the greater the blockage at the lumbar arteries the greater the disc degeneration was also seen so how many of us think that we shrink just because of age right it's again it's wear and tear it's compression our spine is meant to get all you know compressed that's not true i mean i'm gonna be 63 next month and i'm still five foot four i've been five foot four since my teens i have not shrunk and so i i it's not wear and tear it's not compression your discs are not meant to flatten with age this is really a circulatory issue this is impaired circulation to the lumbar arteries and so here's another visual for those of you who can't figure that out this is you know look at the blood supply to the spine well what's going to happen when that's diminished and dr capilla did some really impressive work i mean there are three main branches to the lumbar arteries and she can tell you the symptoms that are common dependent on which branch has impaired circulation her work is just phenomenal she might be somebody you'd like to have on your show i i think she'd be great so so as you can see here this is a disc and and it's got to get blood supply it just has to be there and this picture shows nice normal healthy discs between the vertebrae here and the picture on the right shows not so much and so a lot of us if we're thinking it's age and wear and tear and it's not we need to be informed right this just might um motivate someone to make some changes in their in their food intake if they know that this could improve and i know that um there is something called angiogenesis and i didn't create any slides for that but it's called birth of new blood vessels and the body will create angiogenesis i mean it'll do it for the heart especially when people have the the one main artery in the artery to the heart muscle itself the one that's called the widowmaker because if that one gets blocked most people don't survive the body will actually do an angiogenesis tactic and grow try to grow blood supply around that blacked artery right well then we'll also do it to um injured areas of the body to promote healing and then it will kind of resorb those those added blood vessels that it no longer needs once the healing is done so the body goes through this process and so if you're exercising the muscles need more blood supply right so my thoughts are why sometimes people might have this impaired blood supply but feel better with exercise is because they're getting some angiogenesis results which is great um but it also could be you know their power source is not working there's always that all right and then of course what about the healthy fats which many people right and and i know that your audience is well versed on this but i didn't want to leave this out and so i'm going to share just i think i've got three or four studies here on the oils and how they impair circulation so this has to do with pain right this has to do with lumbar artery disease and if you've got lumbar artery impaired circulation you've got it impaired everywhere right so this one compared angiogram grams so they're actually looking at coronary artery disease patients so this means that their actual heart blood supply is impaired and what they found was the disease cad progressed just as much for those eating a diet high and monounsaturated which is basically olive oil as those eating saturated fats so no difference at all this study the university of maryland actually called it olive oil and they saw that it reduced dilation to the brachial artery which is the artery in the arm and so when it talks about injury to the endothelial cells those are little tiny cells that line all of our blood vessels so so think about um you know this lining of endothelial cells and they rule they produce nitric oxide they do all kinds of things that really impacts our circulation and when we injure them now everything breaks loose and so i won't get off on that tangent that's more when i'm talking about heart disease but but if they're injured they don't produce enough nitric oxide and when they don't produce enough nitric oxide the blood vessels will constrict they won't dilate they won't get nice and big they'll get smaller and we don't want that to happen and a lot of people aren't aware that's how viagra works it increases the production of nitric oxide and there was actually a speaker at that same conference i attended with dr capilla whose title of his talk was um erectile dysfunction the canary in the coal mine he was saying those who have that it's it's you know that's their first sign that they do have uh cardiovascular disease uh it just hasn't been diagnosed yet right so it's important that we don't injure those blood vessels and oil does that uh both omega-3 and omega-6 contribute to the development of plaques damaging the arteries there's tons and tons of data that shows this and so the this is a conclusion of one of these studies a direct influence of dietary so consuming these polyunsaturated fats it has a direct influence on plaque formation so they suggest the current trends favoring increased intake of these should be reconsidered it's not a good idea and then fish oils they really do not protect us there's no evidence of reduced risk of events so people having heart attacks people having strokes people dying from increasing their consumption of these you know this is a large study they looked at 89 different studies and they could not find any evidence of this so finishing up on oils they are not health foods they are concentrated in fat and calories one tablespoon has 130 calories and if you consume three tablespoons of olive oil a day which is easy to do if you follow the mainstream recommendations you're getting a lot of extra calories every 10 days and it can lead to a weight gain of 36 pounds in just one year so you know just one tablespoon of olive oil we're looking at you know that's if you don't make any other changes in your caloric intake right but we don't want to damage those endothelial cells i just put this in here because we talked about weight excess weight and a lot of people struggle to lose weight because they haven't given up the oils so we really need to eliminate added oils from the diet and so this is where i show my next confused slide because people are like why are we keep getting told all these things then if it's not true right um and and i wish i had an answer for that that's a whole nother topic i'm sure um that that aj you've addressed more than once so i love this quote by dr robbins you know we're looking for cures right everybody wants the cure for cancer the cure for diabetes the cure for cardiovascular disease well if we just look at what's causing it it's so much easier right if we if we stop the cause and so if chronic pain um you know we're looking for cures for chronic pain and and unfortunately you know when you when you go to a pain specialist when you go to a chronic pain specialist what do they call themselves they call themselves pain management they don't call themselves pain resolution or you know we're going to get rid of your pain we're going to manage your pain and and nobody wants pain managed they want it gone right we can't we can't address pain with all of these external medications and procedures um i know you know i work with people for many many years in this topic and i've i've met people who you know they're seeking an answer everywhere and they're getting treated and and receiving treatment from all these different professions but they're not doing anything themselves they're not addressing dietary changes they're not addressing exercise and movement they're expecting everybody else to fix them we have to kind of step up and take control over what we're putting in our mouth and the activities that we're performing because we have control over this and that's really good news right this means we don't have to be a victim we don't have to to hope we can find the answer somewhere because the answer really is and what we're putting in our mouth and then how we're treating and moving our bodies so i i'm a big one on cause and as a matter of fact my book you know it's called pain culprits for a reason because a lot of the times the area that's complaining the area that's in pain is the victim and the area that's causing it is the silent culprit nobody is paying attention and so many times we're seen as this body part that walks through the door right you're you they see you as a knee that walks through a door shoulder that walks through the door well guess what everything's connected to everything else we don't take our shoulder off and put it on a shelf when we go to bed right everything's connected and i can tell you and that's not the purpose of today but i can tell you how your your heel bone will create shoulder pain or neck pain i can tell you directly how the ankle will impact those things how the hips and the ankles will affect the knee that 90 of the time it's not the knee it's above and below so we have to look for the cause of things we have to see people as a whole person right and not these these systems you know seeing a cardiovascular specialist and a rheumatologist and all these people who specialize in one area we need a much more holistic approach and what we're putting in our mouth is the best place to start and so you know this picture these foods look amazing right and those of us who are used to eating a whole food plant-based diet you know this might make us drool a little bit you know i love these foods i'm going to show a picture in a little bit of foods that people who aren't used to eating this way might find more tantalizing right because it's not a lot of people say i don't want to graze you know out in the lawn i don't want to eat all that you know they all think that plant-based eating is boring and you can't really do anything well that couldn't be further from the truth and i know from your recipes you know that as well um but the right foods can reduce or even eliminate pain right we want to get rid of pain we don't want to manage it we want to get rid of it so i did want to show um this is one up when i came across this study i was like okay why didn't this get published on the front page of every newspaper in the country right this study was done on diabetic neuropathy which is one of the most painful things to experience in human existence you get sharp shooting pains usually it's to the feet sometimes it includes the hands it can be to other parts of the body but it's horrible painful existence and so what they did was they decided to see how would a low-fat plant-based diet affect diabetic neuropathy so they eliminated animal foods completely they restricted the fat intake and they focused on plants right and then the innervation intervention patients experienced significant improvement in pain significant improvement in pain i mean this is crazy that people don't know this stuff right they even did an electrochemical skin conductions in the foot worsened in the control group so i'll explain this a little bit when you've got diabetic neuropathy you have nerve damage and and you start to lose feeling you you'll still have pain but you won't feel the floor that well you'll kind of have some numbness you'll have some issues and feeling where you are in space these people really struggle with balance you know dynamic stability because if you can't feel the floor with your foot it's really kind of hard to walk with good stability right so it can it worsens and they do this this skin conductance test to see how well the nerves are working in the feet and typically decline is imminent once you start having this this damage this injury to these nerves it continues to worsen over time and what they saw in this study they saw those who did not change their diet that skin conductance worsened but it stayed constant in the intervention group so it did not worsen so this indicated that the diet may have slowed that nerve function decline now this study wasn't really long i think it was about 12 weeks if my memory serves me correctly i've read a lot of studies over the years but but that doesn't mean that over time it might not improve right we don't know the study wasn't done long enough but we know it didn't worsen and then here's the best part over 80 percent of the people in the intervention group reported complete remission complete remission i mean i want to say that 10 times it's like oh my gosh their pain was resolved no more burning pain and they experienced an improved sense of touch and then the other 19 reported some improvement in symptoms so this is a 100 positive response to changing diet when it comes to diabetic neuropathy so why isn't this headline news right it should be and and i i you know i i have to stop myself i get a little bit passionate here but but you know i think i'm the reason i'm breathing on this planet is because my my whole purpose for being here is to help people to get out of pain uh and to have a better life and it just the human misery that's occurring out there because of the lack of information just just freaks me out so that's why i'm so glad i'm humbled and honored to be on this so i can share this information so um here's a study that talks about inflammation in food this one specifically cruciferous veggies right our broccoli brussels sprouts cauliflower all those kind of veggies and they divided this was over a thousand people they looked at and they divided them into five groups based on how many of these cruciferous veggies they ate every single day the lowest fifth ate about a half a cup the highest fifth ate about a cup and a half and then they compared markers for inflammation these tumor necrosis factor tnf interleukin-6 these are blood biomarkers of inflammation going on in the body and they compared them based on the amount of cruciferous veggies they ate and what they found was that those markers were 13 and 25 percent lower in those women who ate um the least as compared to those women who ate the most so so it just we really need to um sorry i think we might have that backwards how that's written i put it in other words down below the less vegetables eaten related to higher levels of inflammation in their bodies and the higher amount of vegetables eaten related to lower levels of inflammation so not sure if i've got that written backwards there so you know if we want a pain-free life we don't want to be eating boxed shrink wrapped in canned foods right and i love this picture because this is the area i live i'm in upstate new york and i'm right across the border from vermont where people actually say can't get there from here that's exactly how they say it right and um and so we're not going to become pain-free eating these types of foods right we want to reduce inflammation we want to protect our circulation and we want to achieve a healthy weight with fresh live plant foods and so this is the picture that uh i said i was going to show so for those of you who don't want to graze on your front lawn and you think eating a whole food plant-based diet is boring these are amazing foods um this gravy is made with no fat um this is fettuccine alfredo completely low-fat vegan using cauliflower to make the cream sauce cauliflower makes amazing cream sauce because it's 11 plant oils so it just gives you that creamy mouth feel i remember i made um scalloped potatoes at one of the events and there was a mother daughter sitting there and the daughter was maybe in her 50s and mom in her 70s and she looked at her mom and she said this tastes just like yours she was shocked she was floored i mean her jaw was like this right so we don't have to suffer to to to feed ourselves so we can get out of pain it's it's possible absolutely possible so i love this statement as well if somebody has been to more than four doctors let's look at what they're putting in their mouth because it's really really important that they understand that that is the first place to look right and then i love these statements the right diet can prevent stop and even reverse disease and impact chronic pain no stage at which dietary improvement cannot make things better and it's really inexpensive to eat well i had an assignment where i had to create for snap people i had to create a diet for snap and i was able to feed them they ate six times a day uh two people on eight dollars a day and so it is not expensive to eat well people say it is it's not and this puts us in control of our health and you know i i put these dots here if a drug could do for and you name it if a drug could do for chronic pain what plants do everyone would be taking it if a drug could do for cancer heart disease diabetes you put whatever whatever you want in there what plants do everyone would be taking it so it's so important that we work to keep ourselves healthy because you know we might be grateful for the things that are helping to elongate life but but we don't really want to be patient i don't know about you i don't want to be a patient i don't want to ever be admitted to the hospital because something's wrong with me right and i teased my husband uh oh my gosh years and years ago when i first started because i've worked in about every field there is acute care and osteopathic and us and outpatient clinics and and nursing home settings and home care and everything and when i was in acute care for years i told my husband when we get older if i get sick shoot me and bury me in the backyard do not bring me to the hospital i just don't want to go there so you know i don't want to be a patient and so you know really the true health care and pain management system or pain resolution system is really plant-based nutrition and you know i have information here uh i do have a monthly newsletter that goes out i just started a new series on bone health so september's was the first edition um and then october will be going out so it's you know i put out topics that have to do with pain and uh having a healthy life and i usually share a recipe and a tip of the month and then for those of you who are interested in moving well and learning how to assess your body with three plane function and figuring out where the culprits are there are um there's lots of free content at this website for those who might be interested in that and uh i think that's about it as far as slides go so i will stop sharing and see if there's any questions which i'm guessing there are there are what a fabulous presentation i felt like i was at a conference oh thank you that was wonderful well the first one i see is from colleen can neuropathy be reversed so um i haven't seen any data that says it can be reversed that doesn't mean that things can improve as i said that one study wasn't done long enough and that was done by pcrm by the way by dr neil barnard because of a study that was done prior to that um that showed that people many years later i think about 70 percent of the subjects had stayed on the healthy diet because of the fact that they were relieved from pain so it goes to show people will change their diet if it makes a difference in their life right um unfortunately i haven't come across any data that that shows definitely it can be reversed but that doesn't mean that it can't be it just means nobody's done a study on it nice you know that was so interesting what you said because i heard that something like 7 out of 10 visits to doctors in general were for lifestyle related things but i never thought about that the reason they were going in the first place was because of pain yeah yeah joint pain back pain shoulder pain stomach pain which is gi related but well that's so interesting just take a moment to thank mary and angela for their super chat donation and there was a question that was uh submitted in advance so i'd like to get to it from amy and it is about something called a theragun machine if you believe in using it after workouts and how long do you recommend it on a muscle group for example her quads right so so that's a very specific question and i and i'm i'm really reluctant to give anybody specific advice because when i do work with people in consulting i get a very detailed history of their medical history what's going on in their world medications they're on past injuries you know surgeries the whole nine yards and i assess them in their three plane function um so there's a lot of devices that come out in the market and a lot of them have different names i'm not familiar with that particular device but i believe um that we determined it was a massage type device and so there's really no way for me to tell somebody how often or how long they should use something and i don't mean to sound like i don't want to give an answer it's that typically if my favorite strategy for addressing muscle pain post exercise well for one thing if you're doing a good workout you're not going to be all that sore after because you're treating your body properly right if you're really sore after a workout then you've probably overdone it um you know you're creating way too much lactic acid and your body's not good at going into an anaerobic phase but but the point is you really want to be um ensuring that you're not overly sore after a workout and if the goal is to promote circulation after a workout then massage can be helpful but one of my very favorite strategies is the melt method um i've been teaching that for about 11 years now and what that does is that's a way for the person to treat themselves it's a beautiful self-care method where they can improve circulation decompress fascia um and and rehydrate the body and it's it's a fabulous way at uh addressing post exercise soreness so hopefully that answer helps great thank you and katie said can you repeat the name of your book and where to get it i know your chapter absolutely yeah it's pain culprits is the name of the book and i had sent a link um to your person i've been posting it in the chat and in the show it's a chapter right it's a chapter of the book yeah if they want the whole book that's available on amazon right it's called nab the culprits without with and with move without and move without pain yep very yes so let's see i do see questions but see because mine goes fast they sometimes disappear and yes mark says does does gluten such as bread cause inflammation in the body so gluten is a very hairy topic um you know there is there's a there's a lot of difference of opinion um personally from what i've seen in the data the majority of the population is fine consuming gluten and they don't have any issues um you know from the last i looked at it's like maybe 13 to 15 of the population that might be kind of dose dependent which means they can get away with having a whole grain toast for breakfast but they don't want to have whole grain pasta for supper and then you know it's too much in one day um but uh and then there's two to three percent that actually have to be medically gluten restricted because of crohn's disease ulcerative colitis most autoimmune issues do better staying away from gluten but the majority of the population i've not seen any data that says generally across the board a healthy person should restrict gluten intake great thank you uh julie says she worked with you and had chronic pain and has been pain-free since working with you and loves the melt method that you taught her oh hi julie that sounds great so i'm looking for oh here's one is there any you well see some of these questions came in before you said it but for example any particular foods for osteopenia or osteoporosis oh well that my newsletter is talking about bone health and um and so i go into the the dark dirty details of osteoporosis and um how many women are being uh intimidated um kind of fear tactics to use medical strategies that are less than optimal so what i find you know like the the typical and i'm not telling anybody to not take a medication so don't hear what i'm not saying um but if somebody is taking a bisphosphonate for instance which is the most common right like fosomax those kind of things um i can't think of the other rest of them off the top of my head but the data shows that they really reduce the fracture risk by a very small amount like maybe two percent and what really reduces fracture risk is healthy eating and staying away from acid producing foods because your body pulls calcium from the bones to neutralize the acid our blood ph has this tiny little window 7.35 to 7.45 and so it will do whatever it can to maintain life and so it takes calcium from the bones to do that so we're literally flushing our bones down the toilet um when we're eating a high acid load diet and so my last month's newsletter and this month and next month will be has a lot of detail on that but there are so many foods that are really good for us that um have plenty of calcium and we absorb what you know what we need uh you know dark leafy greens you know there's tons of them um and i showed charts and i'll be listing them in the newsletter but uh but we really want to stay away from the acid forming foods because that's what makes us lose bone density that's what makes us lose our calcium it's it's what we're what we should not be eating right nobody wants to flush their bones down the toilet right yeah center says what about increasing omega-3 fatty acids by using the plant-based oil from flax seeds to combat inflammation is that harmful i would think so so well the goal is not to consume oils period i know some people like to put flaxseed in their smoothies i don't know that that's a horrible idea um i haven't read that that will promote inflammation or limit inflammation really you know you start getting into and i am the first one to admit i am certainly not a nutrition expert right dr greger could get up here and tell you the long chain acids and the short chain and you know give you the whole chemical breakdown that's not me um but but i i i don't purposely do that myself i think which is the best answer because i think eating foods whole is so much more important and um you know my personal opinion is if we have to grind it up in order to eat it maybe it's not really meant to be consumed daily right because you can't get anything out of flaxseed unless you grind it that's interesting i love that let's see um can vitamin d deficiency cause osteopenia or osteoporosis there are some studies that are linking bone health to vitamin d um i'm a big believer of of making our own because it's a hormone it's not a vitamin and uh and and i think that the general public has become the test subject as far as supplementation with vitamin d because we don't know what that will do to anybody long term i know there's a lot of studies out there i came across one that was fascinating it was um people who entered the hospital who had to be stabilized in order to save their life they were in a life-threatening situation and they had to be stabilized well prior to being stabilized they did a whole bunch of blood work right then they stabilized them then they did more blood work they found those people had very like levels of vitamin d in the toilet before they stabilized them and then the vitamin d levels were normal after they stabilized them and they didn't do anything about vitamin d so there's a lot of studies that show vitamin d is is stored in the tissues and may not be circulating so that question is now the validity of the blood tests because if it's stored in my body's tissues and it's not circulating how is a blood test going to tell me how much vitamin d i have so i think there's a lot more questions than answers and and and it's important that we don't silence scientific debate on these topics because you know to me you can you can define science with two words asking questions and and we have a lot more questions than we have answers when it comes to vitamin d so there's a question will posture affect one's height yes absolutely absolutely you can and it will also affect range of motion and i'll do like a little demonstration sitting here in the chair right so so if you have poor posture if your shoulders are kind of hunched forward and you're hunched forward like this right and you go to lift your shoulder it'll only go so far right it only goes so far now if i sit up nice and straight it goes further see how much more range i have so a lot of the times people are losing range of motion because of postural positioning um yeah posture is huge and many people think that you know they have to try to sit up straight and they have to try to get their head back and they have to try to get in these perfect postures well a lot of the times what happens is because of gravity if we have this forward head posture gravity over the years is going to keep pulling it forward and down so in order to fight gravity we have to do things that helps our body to get back to that normal position and the cool thing is it doesn't matter how old you are i had a patient who was 90 i think she was 93 or 94. i don't remember exactly um she was a catholic nun i loved her dearly she was a spitfire and she did not want to have a forward head and we measured her head when she's when she went against the wall there was four and a half inches between the wall and the back of her head that's how far it was forward and within just about three weeks we had her to like one inch away from the wall so age doesn't matter it's it's training the body properly and um and there are so many ways to improve posture and and get that head back and not have things hurt um that are really effective yeah great thanks alyssa wants to know are balsamic vinegars highly acidic oh that's such a funny question because of you aj i went and sought out balsamic vinegars and i've done research and i've locally found a few places they're olive oil companies but of course i skipped that side of the room and i go over and i got to taste all these amazing vinegars and i had to ask them because you had said you could buy a four percent acidic vinegar right and so i'm looking for this and uh and and when i asked the people in the in the store she said that they started off at two percent and then they aged them so they might even be less than four percent she wasn't sure but they're incredible they don't add any sugar they don't add anything to them and boy i'll tell you there's nothing better than a salad with a flavored balsamic vinegar it's it's and they don't bite they don't have that acidic bite so because of you i knew the answer to that great and you're gonna get two bottles just for being on the show of flavors of your choice so that's absolutely if you're a fan of them i'm sorry oh thank you oh i feel like it's christmas that's wonderful ramona says is arthritis reversible with a plant-based diet so when the damage has actually happened to the joints it depends on how far the damage has gone um i haven't seen any studies that show that the damage reverses however the good news is i have seen many many people no matter how old they are eliminate the pain and that's really what we want right we don't want to be in pain i had this one couple they were from denmark um they were in their 80s and she had a history of joint pain she was using a cane and she said as long as she followed she called it my regimen she goes as long as i follow your regimen and for her she meant no dairy she had no joint pain once she eliminated that food she had no joint pain and she was in her 80s and and i've seen people and then and i do want to add this because i forgot to mention this with the weight loss um you know i do uh well i did when i could show up in person and bring food and everything but the local community college i would do a nourish away paying four week class and i would feed people a four course meal every week because they could taste the food and go home and make the recipes and realize this was good um but class number two which meant was only one week these people were telling me many of them were telling me that their pain was gone or radically improved in just one week of making those changes so so as far as actual joint damage healing i haven't seen any data it doesn't mean that it's not true um it just means that the studies haven't been done or i haven't found them how long are our parts supposed to last because i do know some people and they're not they they're not eating whole food plant-based diet but that have never been overweight they'd still need hip replacements and knee replacements because they're bone on bone right right and that's the lack of the whole food plant-based diet right i have and this is this is cool because uh when i did home care and when i did acute care um i met many people who were over the age of 100. and i was shocked at how many people over the age of 100 were living independent lives driving cooking cleaning doing their own finances shopping and these people come to find out were eating really well their whole life they had all their parts nothing had been replaced and i even had one person in his 90s who told me he never had back pain so you know i ask these people a lot of questions right and if i'm going into their home i'm seeing the bowl of fruit on their counter not the the baked goods and the sweets and the you know the other stuff which i saw on the counters of people who were much less mobile and in a lot of pain terrific uh monarch says does eileen have any tips for someone overweight who is getting double knee surgery oh boy so i mean i'm certainly not giving any specific advice i have experienced patients who've had a double knee replacement um at the same time i did not see good outcomes there so i don't know if this person is planning on having them both done at the same time i have not seen a good outcome um what i've seen and i'm only going to share my my experience right i'm not telling anybody what to do so this is just my experience um i have seen people who had both knees replaced one like maybe a short time or a year later what i've seen and this is interesting and i can't really explain this one surgery always went really well and the other surgery didn't and it could be the same surgeon so for some reason one joint cooperated with the replacement and another joint did not so it's it's a it's a tough call um yes you what i have found is the weight loss and i'm sure you can attest to this you're the expert on this on ultimate weight loss i recommend your book to to pretty much everyone that's appropriate to recommend it to um food really is the number one way to lose weight it's not exercise i've come across so many studies and i've had so many people tell me oh yeah i've gained weight since i haven't been able to move because of my pain and it's like no you've gained weight because of what you're putting in your mouth it's not because you can't move right i mean i've seen people in nursing homes you know they're they're 80 pounds soaking wet and they're in a wheelchair and completely dependent well why don't they grow to 200 pounds because they're not moving no it's it's it's really food so um i'm sure this person's watching you they're going to get all the information they need that will help with that absolutely but i highly recommend if you have a lot of joint pain the melt method is very effective um at helping with pain i really do love it and i have no affiliation with the website i've just been a certified instructor for like i said about 11 years now and uh i use it i teach it to everyone it's a beautiful method it's very helpful right thank you this is an interesting question from anna any advice you can give to high school students especially girls that are forced to wear backpacks that are extremely heavy i i see i used to volunteer in the school before pandemic and a lot of them just have like a little rolling suitcase i don't know how you can legally force somebody to wear a backpack yeah i agree and and i agree they're horrifically heavy and the funny part is the schools are no longer even giving them books so they're carrying binders for every one of their subjects which are tend to be heavier even than a book right and they don't give them enough time between classes to go to their lockers so they have to carry everything around all day i agree rolling them would be ideal i mean there's no i mean and younger people tend to do this anyway because they're like this on their phones all day long right so i mean i see them sitting in the waiting room and i've i've admonished more than one youngster waiting for a parent in the waiting room going oh you're going to be seeing me by the time you're 20 if you don't stop doing that but we gotta you know get up those those backpacks are horrible i agree they really need to be rolling them yep that's what i've been seeing a lot with the kids even younger kids chef dell's watching and he says i have worked with eileen and learned the melt method and it really works maybe you could show that sometimes it sounds like oh dell is one of my favorite people hello dell how are you that's so cool well this has just been one you know i mean i'm really going to watch this presentation again because when i'm i'm also monitoring the chat because it really was excellent and i'm not just saying that you're just such a wealth of knowledge on this subject and it was just a fabulous presentation yeah i'd be happy to do one on obesity and pain i've got lots of data oh well i can't please and maybe i don't know if the melt method is something you can show but it just sounds amazing yeah yeah i could definitely demonstrate and yeah share about it for sure that would be great well thank you so much and guys check out her book and at least check out the free chapter what do you got to lose she's so generous in giving it to us so thank you so much eileen this really was wonderful and i'll get you those two free bottles of balsamic vinegar yeah thank you and thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back tomorrow when my guest is howard jacobson and he'll be discussing his new book you can change other people i can't wait to i find it very difficult to change other people i don't know about you eileen well howard has a special way about him so you know i mean as you and i talked you know i know him and uh yeah he's he's got a way about him for sure and josh legiani was was i think the the book that they put out um fit to fat sit to fit sick to fit that's it because i think it had changed a couple times in the title but um but he has a way about him and and yeah yeah i love listening to his podcast i can't yeah that's how i what's one of the ways i discovered you you were on the podcast yeah yeah awesome well it's six degrees of separation thanks again and thanks

Channel: CHEF AJ

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Id: zEwZ1Shbb-k

Length: 71min 10sec (4270 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2021