Product Review – Soft Drinks
Over the past 30+ years there has been a huge increase in the consumption of soft drink (both full sugar and now diet options), sport drinks and energy drinks.
It’s nothing to see a young teen walking to school with an energy drink in their hand at 8am, or drinking a sports drink, even though there isn’t a piece of sporting equipment in sight and consumption of these is becoming more and more common..
So let’s break it down, what is really in these drinks.
GAPS Diet Long Term
Over the years I’ve talked about The GAPS™ Diet extensively, how we were doing it as a family and the ups and downs that went with that. It’s been a number of years since we did The GAPS™ Diet and I find that a lot of my patients are very curious as to what we’re doing now so I thought I’d share that with you and perhaps give you a strategy for the long term lifestyle approach we’ve adopted.
My decision for the family was to find a happy medium whereby we were still monitoring our gut health and eating based on The GAPS™ Diet but it was a much more relaxed version.
As a GAPS™ Practitioner, when I’m working with patients, the general rule of thumb is that after you’ve finished the Introduction Diet you move to The Full GAPS™ Diet and follow that for 18 months to 2 years before transitioning off The GAPS™ Diet.
Headache and Migraine Hell
Headaches can be quite a pain, literally and given the fast paced, stressful lives we now live it’s really not that surprising that many of us suffer from them in varying degrees. If you do suffer from headaches it’s important to know that there’s different kinds which means there’s different ways of treating them.
Gut Health and Weight Management
Leaky gut, dysbiosis, SIBO, gut flora imbalance, call it what you like, it seems the unhealthy gut bacteria has a lot to answer for. Not only is there inflammation, autoimmune conditions, mental health issues, ADD / ADHD, Autism, recurrent illness, bloating, IBS and a myriad of other conditions, now we also know that it can affect our ability to lose weight.
Bone Broth vs Meat Stock
Being a GAPS Practitioner has meant promoting and using lots of meat stocks and bone broths as part of the healing process. The one thing I’ve come to realise very quickly has been the confusion between what the two are and when is the best time to use them. Today I thought I’d cover off the difference between bone broth and meat stock to try to make it a little easier for you all.
The first thing I’ve noticed is it seems to depend on where you live in the world as to what you interpret as being a broth or a stock as in the USA they tend to use the word broth for what we call stock so no wonder everyone’s confused.
The below explanations are given based on The GAPS Diet and the way we use meat stocks and bone broths to support gut health, healing and sealing as well as ongoing health maintenance.
Eczema Remedies
One condition I seem to treat over and over again is eczema in both children and adults. For young children and babies this can be very distressing and uncomfortable and in teens (especially young women) it can not only be painful and uncomfortable it can also be very damaging to their self esteem.
SIBO – Do you have it?
Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (or SIBO) is a significant health issue with many patients going through life not realising that their gut bacteria is severely out of balance. Although we have bacteria throughout the body the highest concentration should be in the colon, however, in the case of SIBO we tend to find there’s too much bacteria in the small intestine and an overgrowth has occurred.
SIBO can present with constipation (SIBO-C), a combination of constipation and diarrhea (SIBO-M) or with diarrhea only (SIBO-D), which is the most common. It can also be the cause of histamine intolerance, bloating, gas, abdominal pain, belching, flatulence and nausea just to name a few.
Autism and Processed Foods
Keeping a kids diet on track can be hard work but in my experience NOT keeping it on track is harder work. Processed foods are so difficult to keep away from our children especially as they get older and are perhaps out with friends more or just socialising more. These foods are designed to be attractive, tasty and most importantly addictive and the problem I find is they also increase the behavioural issues we experience, especially as parents of children on the spectrum. Due to the highly sensitive nature of their gut health I find to many transgressions = more difficult to manage behaviours = frustration. My advice, if things go astray, don’t beat yourself up, it happens. Simply get things back on track as quickly as you can and you’ll soon turn things around again.