Karen's Newsletter

Welcome to the September edition. It is my pleasure to announce that the long awaited six-week program, Beating Stress: 6 Weeks Moving Towards Health is to be launched in October. This series of thee-hour workshops will be held once a week for six weeks. It builds on the one-day workshop and will help reinforce the positive changes you are making to your lifestyle. In this edition we look at emerging research into the diet of the hunter-gatherer and what may be taken from this information relative to our 21st century Western industrialised diet. Do you know what the benefits of laughter are? And avoid those eggs no more: the humble egg has been given a make over!

1.
Health benefits of Palaeolithic Nutrition

According to Palaeolithic research, metabolically we are the product of two millions years of evolution; about 99 percent of our genetic make-up was defined well before our forebears evolved into Homo sapiens. With the last two million years of human evolution occurring during ice ages that were spiked with inter-glacial periods, both animals and humans were obliged to adapt and adjust to the available foods, and thereby became increasingly carnivorous.

Except for the last 10,000 years, the beginning of which marked the agricultural age, we have been hunter-gatherers rather than farmers. Along with farming came big changes in our diet: we started growing crops, particularly grains, and, for the first time, starch entered our diet in a big way. The advent of large quantities of grains tipped the ratio of animal to plant foods from being more animal to more plant.

Our ancestral eating habits may well be a guide to the best diet for optimum health. Brand-Miller and Foster-Powell believe that our ancestral eating habits may well be a guide to the best diet for optimum health,and that the danger with the current nutritional trend towards high carbohydrate and lower protein diets is that recommended daily intakes of animal food – meat, seafood and eggs – may be less than our bodies were designed for. A recent analysis suggests that the average ratio of plant to animal foods (by energy) was 65 percent animal foods to 35 percent plant foods.

These days, a diet high in protein and fresh fruit and vegetables has been displaced by dairy products and grain foods. Neither of these foods represented significant food sources in hunter-gatherer diets. Current dietary recommendations (protein 15% carbohydrate 55% fat 30%) are based almost entirely on dietary trials and research in Caucasians – the only population group that remains insulin sensitive in a Western environment. For most of the world’s populations (including Asian, African, Asian Indian, Australian Aborigines and Pacific Islanders) many became insulin resistant when they adopt a Western lifestyle: high carbohydrate meals bring about very high blood glucose and insulin levels, which are two of the most important risk factors for major illness.

Some nutritionists are now recommending not only a higher fruit and vegetable intake, but a higher protein and lower carbohydrate diet. Protein is the most satiating of all the nutrients and stimulates heat production, thereby making weight control easier. High protein, low carbohydrate diets have also been shown to reduce insulin resistance, and contribute to improved HDL (good cholesterol) and triglycerides in the blood. Source: The New Glucose Revolution Life Plan, J Brand-Miller & K Foster-Powell 2003.

How Stone Age is your diet?

2. There's something funny about laughter

It’s no joke: laughter may one of nature’s best ways of keeping us mentally and physically healthy. What else can so enjoyably exercise the heart and boost the mood? What else can serve so well as both a social signal and a conversational lubricant?

One thing that researcher, Robert Provine, psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Maryland in the USA has noticed about laughter is that it is something we seldom do alone. Typically, Provine says, a laugh is what he calls social play vocalisation, something we use instinctively to send disarming cues, hold a listener’s attention and offer – or seek – encouragement to go on. “In conversation,” he says, “speakers are often more likely to laugh than listeners.”

Whether or not what the speaker says is genuinely funny, any reciprocal laughter from the listener serves as a powerful reward, reinforcing the direction of the conversation. It also flatters the speaker, which can be a potent card to play when a conversation becomes flirtatious. “Women laugh most in the presence of men they find attractive,” Provine says. “Men are the leading laugh getters; women are the leading laughers.”

Laughter may also protect us from disease. One of the reasons doctors prescribe exercise for their patients is that even light exertion can increase heart and respiration rate, oxygenate the system and reduce levels of stress hormones.

As long ago as the 1980’s Professor of Pathology and Anatomy at Loma Linda University in California, Lee Berk decided to test this theory. He recruited 10 volunteers and drew three samples of their blood before they watched a one-hour comedy video. He then took another sample every 10 minutes during the video and three more after. Laughter, he found, indeed appeared to turn down the release of stress hormones – cortisol, the primary stress hormone, most significantly.

In a follow-up study in 2001, he tracked two groups of cardiac patients for a year after a heart attack. One group was asked to watch 30 minutes of comedy a day as an adjunct to medical therapy; the other received the medical care alone. At the end of the year, the laughing group had lower blood pressure, lower stress-hormone levels and fewer episodes of arrhythmia and, most importantly, fewer repeat heart attacks. “Laughter is a form of internal jogging,” Berk says. “What a nice way to get the lungs to move and the blood to circulate.” Source: Time Magazine January 17, 2005.

Have you had a good laugh today?

3. The humble egg

If, for reasons of their cholesterol content, you have been avoiding eggs, then new research might be music to your ears.

For years now, the humble egg has been the subject of negative scrutiny because of naturally occurring cholesterol. However in a recent study 49 healthy adults were assigned two eggs daily for six weeks. It was found that in healthy adults, consuming two eggs daily for six weeks did not have an adverse effect on blood vessels and did not raise cholesterol levels.

Eggs are a low cost source of high quality protein, vitamins and minerals. Furthermore, eggs enriched with omega-3 fatty acids have been shown to have cardiovascular benefits that surpass ordinary eggs. These include triglyceride reduction and increases in the good high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol. In fact, three omega-3 enriched eggs provide approximately the same amount of omega-3 as one meal of fish.

Have you tried an omega-3 enriched egg?

4. Deep Relaxation CD

This relaxation induction CD will help you to systematically relax every muscle from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. It also includes a rapid relaxation induction. Deep Relaxation runs for 15 minutes

I recommend that you don't listen to it while driving or operating heavy machinery.

Normal retail price $39. Great idea for a gift. To order one please contact elizabeth@acorntraining.com.au

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Any questions?

Upcoming course dates for Towards Health, Performance and Wellbeing

1, 13 September, 18 October, 16 November and 6 December.

If you would like information about these workshops or the dates of the six week series when available please contact elizabeth@acorntraining.com.au

Karen St Clair Is a practicing psychotherapist-nutritional therapist, and the founder of Canberra Stress Management - Canberra's first specialised stress management service, catering to the needs of the public and private sectors. She is an author, a nationally accredited trainer, and has worked with people as a trainer and a therapist in the areas of health and wellbeing since 1987.

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