Eating balanced, nutritious meals and exercising is often associated with your physical health but eating properly and maintaining your fitness can also help keep your mind healthy. What you’re consuming can affect the structure and function of your brain, as well as your mood. Because food fuels your mind, you need to be mindful of what you’re consuming.

Similar to a new car, your brain functions best when it is given high quality fuel — in other words, food. When you choose to consume foods that are rich in vitamins, minerals and antioxidants, your brain can perform at an optimal level. When you eat a balanced and nutritious diet, you’re giving your brain premium fuel to protect it from oxidative stress (waste), which can damage cells.

Processed and refined foods can be considered “low-premium” fuel that may damage your brain because the brain has little ability to eliminate them. People who eat a lot of sugar are harming their brain because the excessive sugar can negatively impact the body's regulation of insulin. Refined sugars can also cause inflammation and oxidation stress.

When your brain is deprived of quality nutrition, free radicals, or waste, circulate within the brain potentially causing additional brain tissue injuries.

After consulting with hundreds of patients, I am seeing a scary pattern that I want to bring to your attention.

Pain comes from all different sources—and that includes exercise. Sometimes you push it, for example if you go on a run and go longer than you ever have before. Sometimes you push it by adding weights to a routine, or even just doing something that’s new to you. Regardless, that pain can make movement and continuing your routine difficult. That’s why it’s helpful to find easy, inexpensive, accessible ways to make pain lessen more quickly. Enter the humble tennis ball.

A tennis ball is an excellent tool because it’s small and easy to use and a great way to get specifically at those trigger points—those sources of pain that might be holding tightness, for example. You can keep a tennis ball on hand anywhere, and in just a minute or two complete an exercise that opens up an area and lets you get on with life. What are those routines and how can you do them? This graphic explains it.

Get to know mitochondria

Mitochondrial dysfunction refers to errors in the function of the specialized organelles (mitochondria) present in every cell of our body with the exception of red blood cells. Mitochondria are best known as the "power plants" of the cells and they make our energy molecule known as Adenosine Triphosphate or ATP, however their role in our body is much more complex than once thought. Without mitochondria we cease to exist, but when these specialized structures don't work right, our life can take a big turn for the worse!

The United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation further explains the complexities:

Trigenics® with Dr. Karl R.O.S. Johnson, DC ends Pam's knee pain in minutes. Pam's severe knee pain has been chronic for at least 10 years. Despite having physical therapy, water therapy, injections and exercise, her knee pain relentless degraded her daily standard of living. Pam used to be very active and really misses being able to go for walks being able to cycle. Thankfully, to her surprise, Trigenics® Treatment by Dr. Karl R.O. S. Johnson, DC relieved Pam's chronic bilateral knee pain In minutes. She was so overwhelmed with the positive changes, it brought her to tears. Take a look for yourself and then call my office at 586-731-8840 to see if you can be helped.

Too Many People Are Hurting And I Want to Help

People dealing with chronic pain are everywhere. We are seeing both children and adults dealing with more and more headaches, back pain, neck pain, joint pain and pain syndromes. Chronic pain is defined as pain that persists longer than six months. Long term pain is often accompanied by other symptoms. These symptoms can include poor sleep, poor emotional control, depression, anxiety, fatigue and burnout.

If you have an autoimmune disease, you may already know it's important to avoid things that triggers flare-ups of your symptoms. While many autoimmune patients use an anti-inflammatory diet to avoid triggering foods, certain environmental chemicals can also cause flare ups.