Creative Commons License photo credit: h.koppdelaney

by Vic Shayne, PhD

Psychology and physiology are merging in some areas, and it’s proving to be a good marriage. Leading edge doctors of both disciplines are now recognizing that the mind and body are one organism. And nutrition helps.

Modern medicine is a new enterprise. While drug companies, physicians and hospitals may love to brag about how they are the best thing going, the reality is that they are the new kids on the block and have a lot to learn in order to fully address most of the health issues of the modern world.

Mindbody medicine is as old as the eastern hills

In the ancient world, in places such as China, Tibet and India the idea that the mind and body enjoy a symbiotic relationship and affect one another is a foregone conclusion. Traditional eastern healing disciplines have recognized for thousands of years that the emotions, stress and thoughts affect specific parts of the body depending on the type of mental state.

But modern thinkers are going beyond these ancient systems and have begun to understand that the mind is not to be confused with the brain. The brain is in the head, but the mind is literally everywhere because its impressions, trauma and feelings are stored throughout billions of cells in the body. In addition, thoughts and emotions are apt to create physiological effects such as restricting blood flow and oxygen to various parts of the body.

The mindbody connection is a deep, interesting and inspiring subject. Doctors are studying not only how pain and disability such as headaches, backaches and urogenitary conditions can result from mental states, but they’re also looking into how to use thoughts to reverse illnesses.

Feeding your mind and body with nutrients

For the moment, however, without going into detail on the fascinating topic of mindbody health care, what’s worth considering is that when you feed your brain, you are also feeding your body.

Many problems with emotions, stress, anxiety and the inability to concentrate can be addressed with specific nutrition. Chief among this nutritional approach are vitamin B complex and essential fatty acids. These nutrients play an important role in nervous transaction, brain activity and more.

You can begin with BFood and Fish Oils

If you are involved in psychological counseling or have stress and anxiety, or even aches and pains, these nutrients will offer both your mind and body with support.

Creative Commons License photo credit: talliskeeton

by Vic Shayne, PhD

Flavonoids are good for your brain, mood and thinking processes.

We’ve all heard of brain food, but for some reason, when people think of nutrition, they tend to think more of what nutrients do for the body than the mind.

Rule number 1: don’t overlook the value of good food in helping you think better and balancing your emotions.

While there are many types of foods and a wide array of nutrients, let’s talk about flavonoids.

What’s a flavonoid?

A flavonoid is a group of organic compounds that occur as pigments in fruit and flowers. Some of the more popular foods that contain flavonoids are apples, chocolate, red wine, and pomegranates. Flavonoids are in citrus fruits, cherries, berries, ginkgo leaves and veggies. And tea, especially green tea.

One of the best supplemental sources is FlavoC. Since flavonoids are not found in vitamin pills, FlavoC provides the actual foods that contain the flavonoids, which only makes sense because flavonoids exist within foods along with helper nutrients (cofactors). But there are other NutriPlex whole food supplements that contain an array of flavonoids as well (listed at the end of this article).

There are five subclasses of flavonoids:

• FLAVONOLS: Quercetin, Kaempferol, Myricetin, Isorhamnetin
• FLAVONES: Luteolin, Apigenin
• FLAVANONES: Hesperetin, Naringenin, Eriodictyol
• FLAVAN-3-OLS: (+)-Catechin, (+)-Gallocatechin, (-)-Epicatechin, (-)-Epigallocatechin, (-)-Epicatechin 3-gallate, (-)-Epigallocatechin 3-gallate, Theaflavin, Theaflavin 3-gallate, Theaflavin 3′-gallate, Theaflavin 3,3′ digallate, Thearubigins
• ANTHOCYANIDINS: Cyanidin, Delphinidin, Malvidin, Pelargonidin, Peonidin, Petunidin

And now here’s how flavonoids in food help you think and feel (emotionally) much, much better

Psychology Today reports, “Scientists already have some proof that antioxidants protect against and even reverse the cognitive declines seen from aging. The brain is especially subject to attack from free radicals of oxygen, as it is extremely metabolically active and the body’s largest consumer of oxygen. Yet, it is deficient in free radicals to start with. Cumulative damage from free radicals occurs across the board but is especially implicated in memory decline, slowing of body movements and the fatigue, irritability, and mood disturbance that mark depression.

Not Rocky Balboa, but rather Gingko Biloba.

One of the more studied plants that contain flavonoids is gingko biloba. Ginkgo biloba is the oldest living tree species. Chinese herbal medicine has used both the ginkgo leaf and seed for thousands of years.

As of recent researchers have shown that ginkgo is useful in cases of dementia and Alzheimers Disease.

Ginkgo is widely used in Europe for treating dementia. It was used originally because it improves blood flow to the brain. Studies also suggest it may work directly to protect nerve cells that are damaged in Alzheimer’s disease. Gingko has a positive effect on memory and thinking in people with Alzheimer’s or vascular dementia. (University of Maryland Med Center)

Get your flavonoids in these whole food supplements

Flavonoids are not contained in vitamin or multivitamin supplements within the food complex. Here are the best supplement sources for flavonoids:

FlavoC, Super Greens, CaroC, VasCor

Stress is a killer, and not necessarily a silent killer, either. It can cause heart attacks, cancer, stroke, stomach ulcers, severe headaches, shortness of breath and pains that your doctor may or may not find with his sophisticated instruments. Scientists have proven that stress is capable of sending nerve transmissions from your brain to your blood vessels and cause them to constrict.

Constricted blood vessels will elevate blood pressure, reduce the amount of blood and oxygen flowing through your body and can cause chest pains in the least.

Fortunately, we are hard-wired to handle at least some degree of stress, but the problem as I see it is that we are not equipped to handle the AMOUNT of stress that we encounter in our modern lives. I say “modern” because we have not evolved as a species to keep up with the rapid evolution of our technology. Thus, we find ourselves, for a good example, traveling at 75mph on the highway when the fact remains that in the natural world, according to our biological makeup, that kind of speed is completely disharmonious to us. Or, we sit behind a desk for nine hours then drive in a car then sit in front of the TV — none of these activities are natural to us. Worse, we fight traffic, argue with customers on the phone then worry about our finances. STRESSSSSS!

Can you avoid stress? To a certain degree, yes. And it seems that the best YOU CAN do is handle stress more efficiently. Here are some Stress Relief Ideas that have been proven to work:

1. Daily exercise. When you get your blood pumping, oxygen goes into your brain, heart and extremities. Certain hormones are released and you ease your mind.
2. Mind exercises. Meditation is scientifically beneficial to the stressed mind. The Buddhists have 2500 years of practice and study in this field and have shown that proper meditation can relax blood vessels and muscles and relax the mind.
3. Avoid junk food and sugar because both of these deplete nutrients from your body that are needed to combat and avoid stress.
4. Eat enough of the vitamin B complex foods. Vitamin B tablets do not do the job. We recommend eating the proper foods, which you can also eat inside of BFood Complex whole food supplement.
5. Go to a spa! Massage, facials, steam baths and lounging around in a pool is great relaxation. If you can’t take time or don’t have the money for a spa vacation, invest in a massage or go to one of the day spas. You can even have your spouse spend at least a half hour massaging you with coconut butter to relax your muscles and lower your blood pressure.
6. Therapy. There are some wonderful forms of psychological therapy that are still being honed as you read this. NLP, biofeedback, brainspotting and hypnotherapy may be helpful in reframing (or finding a new way to look at) your stressful problems that keep you from sleeping at night.
   

A lot of people have grasped on to the idea of meditation over the past twenty years. The practice used to be looked upon by western cultures as a bunch of Eastern nonsense rooted in scary, unscientific, cult-like hoo-hah. But now we know better.

Meditation is good stuff if practiced for the right reasons. The wrong reasons include staring at the photo of a guru or meditating upon some cultish concept. What makes this wrong? Health-wise, it is not achieving any of the goals that meditation can yield in the way of better health. So onto the right reasons…

How do you relax? A better question may even be to ask: Do you REALLY relax when you are trying to relax? If your mind is not leading your body into relaxation, then you aren’t totally relaxing. This is because the mind and body are connected and they interact. One affects the other.

The ideal meditation, to uplift your health, involves relaxing not only the mind, but the body as well. If you can release the tension within your body via your mental focus, then you can begin to heal your body. The mind has the power to send nervous transmission and hormones through your body. Yet our western civilization has very little experience with this now-proven scientific understanding.

Find fifteen minutes per day for meditation. And when you are sitting or lying down in a comfortable position, work on more than just relaxing your mind and clearing your thoughts. Also work on relaxing your body by leading your mind through each body part, fingers, toes, arms, shoulders, head, neck, back, legs, etc. so that you relax these areas completely. Resting your mind is not enough. You have to get your mind to open up a healthy dialog with your body.

There’s an emerging way of looking at health and healing that, ironically, is thousands of years old. But I suppose it takes that long for some people to catch on. I’m speaking about the approach that considers the mind an integral part not only of the healing process, but the cause of diseases.

How can this be? Now we have the equipment, thanks to the evolution of science, to show that certain emotions and traumas directly affect certain parts of the brain. For instance, a feeling of loss can trigger the brain to constrict the blood vessels. This can lead to heart disease. The brain, mind and body are linked. Emotions are key to health and recovery.

The New York Times has reported,

In the 1940′s and 50′s there was a brief revival of interest in the impact of mind on body as psychiatrists like Dr. Franz Alexander and later Dr. Flanders Dunbar formulated and popularized what came to be known as psychosomatic medicine. This discipline depicted emotional upheaval and certain personality types as important contributors to certain physical ailments, suggesting that adjustments in feelings and thoughts might prevent disease or promote recovery. Unfortunately, rather than pursue scientifically the many remedial hints offered by psychosomatics, physicians who heeded the field at all tended to dismiss such diseases as ”all in the mind” and their victims as ”crocks” who took up far too much of the doctor’s time. Or they simply shipped such patients off to psychiatrists.

Now we’ve come full circle and modern medicine is forced to recognize the works of medical doctors, researchers and psychologists who now can prove the connection between the emotions and health and healing. The happier we are, sincerely (not just faking it to fool Mother Nature), the healthier we are.