Dr. Teresa Fuller

Board certified holistic pediatrician

Dr. T's Blog

Change 1 Thing! January Challenge

by Leave a Comment

“Change 1 Thing” Challenge

Have You Accepted the Challenge?

Take One Year to Develop a Lifetime of Optimal Health!

“Change One Thing” is a 12 step process over one year to help you achieve your health goals.  You simply commit to make one change in your lifestyle every month, so that by the end of the year, you will have completely transformed to a healthy lifestyle. 

Why each month?  It takes about 21 days to establish a new habit.  So each month, you will firmly establish one change before starting another.  Are you willing to take the challenge?

Your January Challenge (should you choose to accept it):

“I will drink my optimal amount of water every day”

What is my optimal amount of water?

  • Adults need at least eight 8-ounce cups of water per day. But if you’re overweight, you should add about 8 ounces of water intake for every 25 pounds of excess weight.
  • Children should drink about half their weight in ounces of water.  For example, a 40 pound child should drink about 20 ounces of water daily (about 2 and ½ cups)

What You Can Expect from This One Change:

  • You will have a decrease in the symptoms of dehydration.  Dehydration leads to fatigue, headaches, back aches and joint aches.  As many as 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated. 
  • If you have problems with constipation, like 40% of Americans have, this one change will improve your regularity. 
  • You will lose weight.  Why?  The average American drinks 10% of his or her daily caloric intake.  By replacing sweetened beverages with plain water, you will be on your way to losing unwanted pounds.

Broccoli sprouts: a simple way to ameliorate a myriad of diseases?

by Leave a Comment

“We and many others around the world, have developed an enormous body of laboratory and pre-clinical data, and a burgeoning body of clinical evidence addressing the potential that sulforaphane has, not only in the prevention of environmental carcinogenesis, but in the prevention or amelioration of a very large, diverse, and seemingly unrelated series of conditions…[that] include autism spectrum disorder (ASD), schizophrenia, bacterial and viral infections, prostate, lung, breast, skin, and head and neck cancers, osteoarthritis, type 2 diabetes, sickle cell disease, fatty liver, and asthma.” Read more here…

Reference: Fahey Jed W., Kensler Thomas W. The Challenges of Designing and Implementing Clinical Trials With Broccoli Sprouts… and Turning Evidence Into Public Health Action. Frontiers in Nutrition, Vol 8 . Apr 29, 2021

The Best Offense is a Good Defense

by Leave a Comment

Loved the discussion with Dr. William Li on the Model Health Show podcast! Dr. Li lays out 5 key health defense systems that define optimal health. As always, Shawn Stevenson’s program is full of actionable items that we can take to improve our health right now. By the way, Dr. Li specifically mentions how shoring up our defense systems helps fight back against long COVID syndrome.

So here’s one tip to strengthen each health defense system as recommended by Dr. Li:

1)Angiogenesis: growth of new blood vessels to improve your circulation

  • Tip: Eat 2 fresh fruits and 3 vegetables daily. Optimize this practice by including fruit peel in your fruit intake. A great way to increase fruit peel is by consuming dried fruit if your system can handle the sugar.

2) Boost your Stem Cells

  • Tip: Dark chocolate (80% or higher) can double the number of stem cells in your blood stream

3) Healthy Microbiome

  • Tip: Kiwi’s high fiber content. Eating 1 kiwi per day will “quickly start to change the number of your healthy gut bacteria.”

4) DNA self-repair

  • Tip: Sunflower seeds slow down the degradation of DNA

5) Healthy immune system

  • Tip: consume broccoli sprouts which contain 100x the immune-supporting compound called sulforaphane found in mature broccoli

Always a wealth of great info on the Model Health Show. Dr. William Li’s book is called Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body can Heal Itself

Change 1 Thing! April Challenge

by Leave a Comment

“Change 1 Thing” Challenge

Have You Accepted the Challenge?

Take One Year to Develop a Lifetime of Optimal Health!

“Change One Thing” is a 12 step process over one year to help you achieve your health goals.  You simply commit to make one change in your lifestyle every month, so that by the end of the year, you will have completely transformed to a healthy lifestyle. 

Why each month?  It takes about 21 days to establish a new habit.  So each month, you will firmly establish one change before starting another.  Are you willing to take the challenge?

Your April Challenge (should you choose to accept it):

“I Will Exercise for 30 minutes at least 3 times per week”

Ways You Will Benefit from This One Change:

Exercise is great for the heart: Exercise has been shown to reduce blood pressure.  And by doing so, it reduces the risk for stroke and coronary artery disease.  Studies have shown as much as a 31% reduction in cardiovascular disease among people who regularly exercise.

Exercise reduces cancer.  One third of the cases of breast, colon and kidney cancer are attributed to obesity and lack of physical activity.  Exercise can therefore, reduce your risk of these diseases.  Also, studies have shown that physical activity can reduce breast cancer risk by as much as 30 to 40%.

Exercise reduces bone disease.  Obesity is a primary risk factor for osteoarthritis.  In women who were overweight, as measured by a body mass index of greater than 25, a loss of just 5.1 kg (about 10 lbs), cut the risk of osteoarthritis by 50%.  Exercise also has a positive effect on bone mineral density and strength, thereby reducing the risk of osteoporosis.

Exercise strengthens mental health:  Exercise reduces depressive symptoms, and reduces anxiety in both adults and children.  Studies have shown that exercise can be as effective as anti-depressant medication.  It makes sense, because exercise regulates neurotransmitter release in the brain, most notably dopamine and serotonin.  These are the same neurotransmitters targeted by the most common antidepressant medications on the market.  Exercise is also associated with improved self-esteem and improved behavior in children. 

Exercise is great for the brain.  Studies have shown that physical activity enhances memory and learning, reasoning, attention, problem-solving and intelligence testing.   Exercise also promotes neurogenesis, which is the production of new nerve cells, and protects the nervous system from injury and neurodegenerative disease.  Want to decrease your risk of dementia in half?  Exercise does this.  Your risk of Alzheimer’s disease can be reduced by as much as 60% by exercise! Exercise also increases brain volume in areas implicated in executive processing.  By the way, by reducing the risk of diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease which all have a negative effect on brain function, exercise further protects the brain.

One way that exercise improves brain function is simply through enhanced blood flow.  Blood removes waste products that accumulate in the brain.  Along with that increased blood flow comes oxygen.  The oxygen acts as a scavenger of free radicals, which damage brain cells.

Exercise slows aging: Studies indicate that the presence or absence of a sedentary lifestyle is among the greatest predictors of aging.

Really, can you afford not to exercise?  If you didn’t accept any of the previous challenges, don’t miss this one! 

Ideas for Making it Happen

  • Take a 30 minute walk; make sure your pace is fast enough to get your heart rate up
  • Put on some good music and simply dance or step in your living room for 30 minutes
  • Record an exercise program from the television and simply follow that routine (it’s like having a free personal trainer!)

       Don’t forget to continue your:

January habit of drinking at least 8 glasses of water per day (1/2 your weight in ounces of water per day)

February habit of eating 7 to 9 servings of fruit and vegetables per day

March habit of replacing refined white foods with whole grains

“Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.”

– Edward Stanley, Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Another COVID treatment your doctor may not know about

by Leave a Comment

Did you see 60 Minutes on Sunday (March 7, 2021)? Dr. Lenze discussed his study on a generic, cheap medicine that was shown to be effective as a treatment for COVID-19. The medicine is fluvoxamine, an antidepressant that may be useful as a repurposed medicine. The problem is, it got very little press and few doctors know about it.

The study involved 152 participants from April through August of 2020 who were randomly assigned to receive either 100 mg fluvoxamine or placebo 3 times daily for 15 days. Clinical deterioration (defined as shortness of breath, hospitalization for SOB, pneumonia or oxygen saturation of less than 92% on room air) occurred in 0 of the 80 patients in the fluvoxamine group, but in 6 of 72 patients in the placebo group. It’s a small study, but it did meet criteria for clinical significance. A larger study is currently underway and may be released as soon as April 2021.

Other treatments and preventive therapies also have mounting research studies behind them. Ivermectin, as used in the I-MASK protocol created by Dr. Paul Marik is an example. I-MASK also incorporates vitamin D. Vitamin D has numerous studies showing its effectiveness for prevention and newer studies finding it to be an effective treatment for COVID-19.

Your doctor may not know about these therapies to offer them to you. Therefore, links have been included here for you to find out more information and to share with your doctor.

References

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/fluvoxamine-antidepressant-drug-covid-treatment-60-minutes-2021-03-07/

Lenze, EJ, Mattar C, Zorumski CF, Stevens A, Schweiger J, Nicol GE, Miller JP, Yang L, Yingling M, Avidan MS, Reiersen AM. Fluvoxamine vs Placebo and Clinical Deterioration in Outpatients With Symptomatic COVID-19: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA. 2020 Dec 8;324(22):2292-2300. doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.22760. PMID: 33180097; PMCID: PMC7662481.