“If It’s Good Enough For The Pros…”

As a chiropractor in Freehold NJ in practice for the past 13 years I have helped many patients who suffer with Fibromyalgia.  In our previous posts on Fibromyalgia, we started to discuss the causes and some therapeutic treatments like chiropractic.  Many people do not know that there are dietary recommendations if you suffer with fibromyalgia.

If you would like to read our previous 3 posts on this Fibromyalgia series you can click:

The Frustrating Road Of Fibromyalgia Finally Helped by Freehold Chiropractor – Part I

The Frustrating Road of Fibromyalgia Sufferers Finally Helped By Freehold Chiropractor – Part II

Freehold Chiropractor Helps those Suffering the Frustrating Path of Fibromyalgia – Part III

Today we are going to start discussing Diet Recommendations for Fibromyalgia sufferers.    What I’ve discovered over the years is that there are specific dietary goals that you should follow to allow your body to heal quickly!  Remember that the body has innate intelligence and knows how to heal itself.   All we have to do is provide it with everything that it needs and the body heals on its own.  That means you have quite a bit of control over the healing process.

Here are five simple guidelines with diet that I recommend:

1.      Take good multivitamin/mineral tablets with as many of the vitamins and minerals in them that you need.

2.      Add extra antioxidants both from foods and from supplements – vitamin A, C, and vitamin E.  Add extra nutrients that provide the body with more oxygen such as germanium and coQ10.

3.      Eat enough protein in your diet and lower the amount of carbohydrates in your diet.  This will keep diabetes and blood sugar problems away.

4.      Cut out the processed foods.  They do you no good.  Whatever time you think you save in cooking is no tradeoff for being sick later.  These foods are not nourishing and will not bring you vitality and a long healthy life.

5.      Heal your intestines with yogurt or kefir milk.

We’re going to concentrate now on the first of the 5 guidelines and we will continue with the other four in  our next blog posts.

I want to start with vitamins and minerals because this is one of the easiest things to start with.  Many people think taking a multivitamin and minerals is a waste because they just flush right down the toilet.  Sometimes people find it difficult to change their diet in the beginning.  Adding a supplement plan is a lot easier.

Everyone needs good multivitamin and mineral tablets.

First of all, let me tell you that it’s impossible to get everything you need from your diet.  One of my good friends was a dietitian in a nursing home who carefully planned out diets of the residents with the aide of a computerized software program.  Well, you would think that it must have been easy for those residents to get all their nutrients in the 3-meal a day plus snack plan, wouldn’t you?  Not so!

My friend told me confidentially that only if she included liver a few times a week was it possible to get MOST of the nutrients.  And how many people love liver?  Not too many I know.

That’s why you need a multivitamin and mineral supplement.  The concept of a one a day tablet DOES NOT WORK.  High quality multivitamin mineral tablet bottles will tell you to take two, four or six per day, and these are generally much better ones for you, providing more of the 24+ vitamins and minerals you need.  You just can’t fit in everything you need into one pill, even a horse-sized pill.

Personally I recommend a full spectrum liquid vitamin, mineral and antioxidant all in one.  Liquids absorb better to give you the most of your supplement.

What does a good multivitamin/mineral supplement contain?

Here’s the breakdown that I have found to be successful:

Vitamin A 5000 IU

Vitamin B1, B2, and B6 10-25 mg

Vitamin B3 (niacin)       25-100 mg

Vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid) 5-10 mg

Vitamin B12 100 mcg

Biotin 300 mcg

PABA, inositol, choline – should be on the label, amounts vary

Folic acid 400 mcg

Vitamin C 30-500 mg

Vitamin K 30-100 mcg

Vitamin D 400 IU

Vitamin E 30-200 IU

Calcium 800-1200 mg

Magnesium 400-600 mg

Phosphorus 400-600 mg

Iodine 150 mcg

Boron 2-3 mg

Iron 10-15 mg

Silicon Less than 1 mg

Manganese 2-5 mg

Molybdenum 75 mcg

Lithium 1 mg

Selenium 75-150 mcg

Chromium 75-100 mcg. No overdoses on this one, please!

Vanadium 0.1-0.3 mg

Zinc 15 mg

Copper 2 mg

Silicon  any small amount

Strontium 100 mg

Tin 3-4 mg

Natural or Not?

Supplements that are “natural” may be in a base of alfalfa, rose hips, and molasses because these foods help increase absorption.

Many supplements won’t have every one of these listed nutrients as ingredients; however, the more of them in your supplement, the closer you will be to achieving good health.

The levels of these nutrients in the list provided are enough to maintain good health, not correct vitamin or mineral deficiencies.

What is it about vitamins and minerals that helps the body heal?

Every cell in our body requires dozens of vitamins and minerals to work properly.  In the first part of the 1900s, scientists and doctors discovered that when one vitamin or mineral is deficient in the body, specific symptoms arose. These are called deficiency symptoms.

Have you heard the story about the sailors coming to America who were ship bound for several weeks at a time?  They didn’t have any fresh food, fruits or vegetables on those ships and within a few weeks, they started developing symptoms such as bleeding gums, anemia, nosebleeds, slow healing of wounds, fatigue, depression, decreased resistance to colds and flu and also spontaneous bruising.  Spontaneous bruising is where a bruise shows up when someone stumbles into a cedar chest or a coffee table in a dimly lit room.  This doesn’t usually happen, only in a deficiency.

Guess What Type of Vitamin Was Deficient the majority of the time?

That was a vitamin C deficiency, and someone discovered that just by squeezing a half of a lime into their water each day eliminated the symptoms.  That’s how vitamin C was discovered as being one of the important vitamins and minerals needed for good health.  The sailors were called limeys because they started packing cases of limes into their ships just to prevent the vitamin C deficiency disease called scurvy.  Scurvy has all those symptoms I mentioned before.

There is a Vitamin C/ Fibromyalgia connection!

`What’s amazing is how vitamin C is clearly tied in with some of the reasons why fibromyalgia patients have certain symptoms.  The first symptom is depression. Studies show that fibromyalgia patients have lower levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine that can result in depression, restless leg syndrome, tremors, and increased perception of pain.  That’s because dopamine is important in pain perception and natural analgesia.  Mentally, dopamine levels create healthy assertiveness, motivation and a readiness to meet life’s challenges.  Who doesn’t want that?

Dopamine levels can be depleted by stress, lack of sleep, alcohol, sugar and caffeine.  There is a simple way to increase dopamine levels in the body; it’s by increasing the levels of the amino acid tyrosine found in protein foods in the diet.  The high quality proteins found in turkey, chicken, fish, beef, pork and wild meats, eggs and dairy products are best.  Tyrosine is also high in almonds, avocados, bananas and sesame seeds.

Here’s the vitamin C connection to tyrosine:  Vitamin C improves the metabolism of tyrosine that is also used in the production of thyroid hormone. Some fibromyalgia patients are low in dopamine; others have low levels of thyroid hormone.  Both are helped with vitamin C.

So, that is part of our dietary recommendations for our Fibromyalgia patients.  We have been helping residents of Freehold, Marlboro, Manalapan, Howell, Jackson, Colts Neck and others in Monmouth County, New Jersey.  If you are near our Freehold office, Hometown Family Wellness Center, contact us for a complimentary Fibromyalgia consultation.

Find out more about our office at www.chiropractorfreehold.com