Foundational Health: What It Is And Why It Is Important – Part 1
Dr. Trevor Miller and Jessica Miller, RN work on foundational health. Their expertise cover a wide birth of topics giving them the unique ability to recoginze unuasual patterns. This allows them to be able to pick out issues that others have missed or that previous treatments have uncovered.
We often get asked why our system is set up the way it is for Integrated Health of Indiana. The answer is simple, we don't want people to be dependent on us. We want people to be able to be happy and exist without us and without crutches, supplements, medications, or special pills, potions, and powders; as Jessica says, we are trying to put ourselves out of business. Not that it doesn't take those to help you heal and get to foundational health, but we just don't want those forever.
Do a thought experiment with me. What happens if everything changes tomorrow? What happens if the fraud in medications and supplement gets worse? What happens if you cannot trust them anymore? I am not saying it will happen, but being prepared for this possibility doesn't hurt; it really isn't hard, and it has all kinds of positives with very few negatives.
This does come with a caveat: It depends on how much damage you have already done to your body. My mother always said, “You can do it better if you try.” In this case, it means no matter what your current state is, you can be healthier. We have yet to see this tenant proven wrong in our practice. We have years of medical symptoms questionnaires to back that statement up.
What we are discussing is called foundational health. We discussed this at length on our YouTube channel. Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Dan Kalish, Dr. Chris Kresser, Dr. Peter Attia and numerous other doctors call these the Pillars of Health. Functional medicine looks at them as “the basics," and they are assumed to be implemented from the start. We often see that these are skipped over, not discussed, or deemed not important. They are typically the failing points of most treatment plans. If these tenants are so important, what are they? They are (in order of importance): 1) sleep, 2&3) nutrition and movement, 4) stress, and 5) community. If you have read our other articles, you will see a recurring theme. Let's take a moment to describe each one of these again and give you some resources for each:
Sleep: We touched on this briefly in the article “Why Functional Medicine Fails." Here's another brief overview. You need to give yourself an 8-hour sleep opportunity ±30 minutes. We are not going to go into detail here, but if you're having trouble sleeping, here are some great resources to start with. Then, consult a functional medicine doctor to help you on your health and healing journey. You can find us on the link or here.
Why We Sleep by Dr. Matthew Walker. This title explains why we sleep and why sleep is important.
Sleep Smarter by Sean Stevenson. It has ideas on how to set yourself up for better sleep and how to execute on it to make your home a better place to sleep.
Sleep to Win by Dr. Kirk Parsley. Why sleep is important, ideas for better sleep, and some great resources and research on sleep. It also talks about how it affects even the fittest of us.
Personally, we use the Oura Ring to monitor our sleep. It has a wonderful app that provides a really accurate breakdown of your sleep and sleep cycles and gamifies getting good sleep.
Movement and nutrition: these two are interchangeable. For some, nutrition is more important, and for others, movement is more important. Regardless, these two are essential to foundational health. In our practice, we see that the older patients need movement, and our younger patients need more nutrition. Movement is not only important for the maintenance of the musculoskeletal system, but it is essential to the health of the immune system and the hormone system and has a profound impact on mental health. The adage “If we could bottle exercise, it would be the best-selling drug ever” is very true.
But how do you know how much exercise is right? Movement is known as a "Goldilocks" component. That means too much exercise causes stress and starts to break down the body and too little exercise allows the body to decondition and grow unhealthier both internally and externally. The best researcher and practitioner for movement that I know of is Dr. Peter Attia. He has several podcasts on movement and Zone 2 Training. As a matter of fact, he goes into detail on Zone 2 Training and how important it is to the body. He does a fabulous job on quantifying how much Zone 1, Zone 2, and Zone 3 Exercise we need. A great device that we use, as well as him, to monitor our exercise and stress levels is a device called the Morpheus. It measures heart rate variability, which, to date, is the best way to measure stress in the body. If you're not going to be a professional athlete or something similar this is a great tool for the novice as well as the advanced.
Nutrition is such a mess right now. Between poorly designed studies, diet wars, and just blatant lies about what good nutrition is, it is hard for somebody to figure out how to eat. I get the question: Do I need to be a carnivore? Should I go vegan? Should I go keto? Should I be paleo? These are asked of me daily. The truth of it is if you have good foundational health, you really want 2/3 of your plate to be vegetables and the last third to be a good healthy protein. But the media, advertising, and the unrelenting advertising of ultra-processed and junk foods is ridiculous. It creates confusion and helps drive our health epidemic, here is a recent podcast talking about the issue. Unfortunately, there are political underpinnings, but if you ignore that and listen to the information, it is good to know. Here are some good books to read as well: Death by Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Have Ruined Our Health by Denise Minger, and The Unhealthy Truth: One Mother's Shocking Investigation into the Dangers of America's Food Supply and What Every Family Can Do to Protect Itself by Robyn O'Brien and Rachael Kranz.
It is no wonder that people get frustrated and throw up their hands and defeat. One way to think of these special diets is to think of them as tools. Each special diet has a purpose; what is that purpose, and what should it be used for? For example, keto, carnivores, vegan, and vegetarian can all control insulin, and it has been shown to help control and reverse diabetes. These are just examples of what they can do when used appropriately. We are not proponents of any one of these diets. Each case must be assessed on its own merits and the appropriate tool used. Need more fiber? Vegan, vegetarian, paleo are to be considered, this is because of the emphasis on vegetables and fruits. These also help with the diversification of the microbiome because they contain more soluble and insoluble fiber. But again, overall, a good rule of thumb is for 2/3 of your plate to be vegetables of all different colors, and 1/3 of your plate to be a lean protein.
Here is a link to our video, on the foundational supplements that we use with our patients in-house and what it does for them. The reason supplementation is necessary is because our food system has pulled the nutrients out of the soil and, therefore, out of our food. Here are a few books about the problems we face with this dilemma: Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture by Gabe Brown, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery, Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life by David R. Montgomery and finally, Food Fix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet–One Bite at a Time (The Dr. Mark Hyman Library Book 9) .
If you have not altered your microbiome or hormones too terribly, this is a great way to maintain health. But if you're having issues, we are here to help or consult a functional medicine doctor.
If you don't know how much fiber you are getting, try tracking your food intake for a bit with an app called Cronometer. If you track for about a week or two you can see your fiber and micronutrients well and start tweaking your diet from there.
A great book to read is Food: What the Heck Should I Eat? (The Dr. Mark Hyman Library, 7)
Read more from Dr. Trevor Miller and Jessica Miller, RN
Dr. Trevor Miller and Jessica Miller, RN, Integrated Health of Indiana
Dr Miller and Nurse Jessica have dedicated their professional lives to helping people live their best lives. Concentrating on healing from the inside out, they use a program to comprehensively address problems with hormones, foundational gut health, the micrbiome and mitochondrial health. Realizing that these are all tied together and addressing them as a whole leads to happier and healthier pateints.
