Anyone that was at our Live to Be 139 Class on Tuesday night will recognize these words. Many people attending asked me to send them out in my next newsletter for the Clinic.

We have many exciting things on the horizon both personally and professionally for Dr. Harper and for Harper Chiropractic. We are excited to have just launched our new Harper Chiropractic website. It has been redesigned and made to be mor user friendly. You can check it out at www.harper-chiropractic.com take a look and let us know what you think!

Dr. Josh Morris manages our Hormone (BHRT) Program, He manages our Thyroid patients and is in charge of our LDA (Low Dose Antigen) Allergy Therapy program. For anyone who suffers from any type of allergies I will have more information on this program in the next few weeks!

Anyway, on to the action steps Dr. Harper talked about. This is meant to be a guideline to assist you in creating a Road Map to attain a healthy lifestyle.

1. Read positive books. (Barking up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker)
2. Write down everything you eat for one week.
3. Collect all blood work you’ve had done in the past 6 months.
4. Bring it to the office.
5. Find a dollar amount you want to invest in your health on a monthly or yearly basis.
6. Write a list of goals for your health. Short and long term.
7. Schedule a 15-minute nutrition consult at the office, if you are ready for a detailed plan.
8. Spend 30 minutes with us to help build your plan.
9. Get labs and or X-rays/tests needed to build your plan.

These Food Cravings Aren’t Your Fault

            More and more scientists are referring to the gut as the “second brain.” So much information is processed there that it’s easy to begin to wonder who—or rather what—is in control of our bodies when you start falling down that rabbit hole. The twist is that there’s a lot of truth to our guys controlling many of our moods. An incredible amount of new research is proving this. Researchers have found that the bacteria in your gut really do influence your emotions.

It sounds far-fetched, but it’s true.  Gut bacteria have been implicated in a range of conditions that affect mood, especially depression and anxiety.  Yes, emotions are generated in your brain but the bacteria in your gut are able to influence in ways your five senses don’t. What research has discovered so far is that there are bacteria that can make you feel good and bacteria that make you feel bad. Gastrointestinal complaints have long been associated with depression, anxiety, insomnia and many other diseases we previously thought of a solely “mental” illnesses.

The World Health Organization (WHO) rates depression and anxiety as the number one cause of disability, affecting 300 million people worldwide. The link between your gut and the brain shakes up the belief that mental illness is purely a chemical imbalance in the brain.  This also changes how we can potentially treat it, too.

Bacteria have been known to be detrimental to our health for roughly 350 years, but in recent decades we learned that there are friendly bacteria, too, often called probiotics. In 2004, Nobuyuki Sudo at Kyushu University, Japan discovered that mice lacking microbes had an abnormal response to stress. They were testing to see the effect physical disease had on these mice and were taken for a loop when differentiating behaviors cropped up.

The usual germ-covered group displayed calmer behavior while the sterilized mice reacted more severely to stressors. Adding healthy bacteria back to the mice corrected the stress response. And so the term “gut-brain axis” was born.

Various fields of research worked to duplicate Sudo’s results and target specific correlations. One such pattern that emerged was a dramatic drop in serotonin, a neurotransmitter linked to depression. Reasserting balance in the gut microbiome corrected the emotional imbalance. In 2013, this led to the concept and term “psychobiotic.” Psychobiotics are a class of probiotics believed to have a positive impact on mood in humans.  These findings suggest we can use our diet to positively influence our mood.