Health Podcast: Birthdays Are Dangerous; Hormone Super Powers; Relax Your Jaw

In this episode we feature:

An interview with Integrative Medicine Specialist, Dr. Tasneem Bhatia

Hum your stress away.

Morning Workouts are best.

Cold weather heart risk.

And more ways you can improve your health today!

For more information, and to sign up for our private coaching, visit tesh.com

Our Hosts:
John Tesh: Instagram: @johntesh_ifyl facebook.com/JohnTesh
Gib Gerard: Instagram: @GibGerard facebook.com/GibGerard X: @GibGerard

Transcript

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Gib. Hello and welcome to another episode of the podcast. I'm Gib Gerard, here with another one of my favorites, special intelligence for your health, with Connie Celica. Edition of the podcast today. Connie's guest is none other than Dr Tasneem Batia. She's the author of the book The hormone shift. She's going to talk about the key phases that women go through in life, all that and more coming up. So here, without further ado, is intelligence for your health. With Connie Celica, if you want your brain to work better all day, exercise in the morning. That's according to the University of Western Australia, they found that adults who engage in moderate intensity workouts in the morning have sharper brains the rest of the day. That's because morning exercise elevates a protein called brain derived neurotrophic growth factor, B, D, n, f, which helps neurons survive and thrive, and levels of that protein remain high for eight hours after a morning workout. As a result, people who exercise in the morning have better concentration, attention span, executive function like decision making and working memory. So if you need to be at your best mentally, make time for a morning workout. We've talked a lot about the effects of sitting all day, according to Yale medicine, prolonged amounts of sitting increases the risk of early death from any cause. It's also linked to type two diabetes, heart problems, weight gain, depression, dementia and multiple cancers. Well, aside from getting up every hour to move, here's something else you can do to counteract the effects of sitting. Drink more coffee. A big new study published in the journal BioMed Central shows a clear relationship between more coffee and fewer negative consequences of too much sitting. The study followed 10,000 people over more than a decade, and it found that regular coffee drinkers who sat for six or more hours a day were one and a half times less likely to die of all causes than non coffee drinkers. Basically, the coffee drinkers habit canceled out the health risks of a sedentary lifestyle. No one really knows if it's the antioxidants and other natural compounds found in coffee or the caffeine, but there is a definite link. Now we're not saying your Starbucks run can replace a real run, but coffee can help offset too much sitting Coming up, we'll talk to women's health expert, Dr Tasneem Bhatia, better known as Dr Taz. She'll talk about two phases in a woman's life, when you can legitimately call her a super woman, and how those phases affect her mood and behavior. But first, here's a heads up for anyone with heart disease, be careful in cold weather, because when you inhale cold air, you chill blood vessels around your airways, causing them to constrict, and that quadruples the odds of dangerous blood clots forming. Cardiologist, Dr Joel Khan says he tells his patients to be especially careful shoveling snow or hunting big game in cold temperatures, because the labor of those two things can put extra pressure on the heart. So he recommends taking specific precautions. Dress warmly, cover your mouth with a scarf to warm the air you're inhaling, and stay hydrated to thin your blood. And sometimes it may be better to leave the heavy lifting to someone else and play it safe. Here is a powerful stress relief tip. It comes from Dr Kiran Rajan, a lecturer at the University of Sunderland in the UK. He says the key to calming down and improving your resilience to stress can be found in your throat, because by singing, humming or even gargling water, you activate the muscles at the back of your throat, which are connected to the vagus nerve. Now you may have heard me talk about the vagus nerve before. It's the longest nerve in the body, traveling from your ears to your abdomen, and the more you can get your vocal cords to vibrate, the more your vagus nerve is activated, and that puts you in a parasympathetic state. Now that means your heart rate and breathing slow down, which reduces anxiety and promotes relaxation. And the more easily you can put yourself in a parasympathetic state, the more capable your body will be of adapting to stressful situations, all that from just spending some time humming, singing or gargling. Okay, listen to this once you catch a cold, you know, chicken soup is the recommended go to treatment. But if you don't want to catch a cold in the first place, have tomato soup. According to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, cooked tomato products, including soup and spaghetti sauce, can help us avoid getting sick to begin with, that's because the lycopene and other nutrients in tomatoes, which become even stronger when they're cooked, boost the activity of your immune cells by a whopping 38% today, our special guest is Dr Tasneem Batia in her latest book, The hormone shift, she breaks down the key phases in a woman's lifetime when she can expect her hormones to suddenly make her feel out of whack. Dr TAS says most people know about the changes that happen early in life, at puberty and again late in life, at menopause, but somewhere in the middle are two phases that Dr Taz describes as the superstars and super women eras. So I asked her to tell us about them. So the super women era is from about 39 to 55 the superstars is 29 to 38 each of these groups of women are dealing with the issue of multitasking and juggling without really having the support that's needed to do everything that they've signed up to do. So if we start with the superstars they really are dealing with, often the starting of a family, the starting starting to have children. So the children are often very young. That really pulls on women. It depletes their energy, it depletes their natural resources and their nutrients. So we've got women in this era walking around super tired, super fatigued, and really running on empty. Now you take that woman and she then crosses into the Super Woman era, which is starting at about 39 which is, you know, classic perimenopause. They're walking into that era depleted. Their hormones are shifting now all over the place, and they're having trouble just keeping it together. They're feeling, oftentimes very unhinged. So they may see it as now, okay, I can't process information the way I used to. I'm gaining weight. I am irritable all the time. I'm having other symptoms like joint pain or acne or hair loss or breast tenderness. I can't sleep at night. But they have not had a great resource or toolbox, you know, to turn to to really help them navigate all those different shifts. Today we're talking to women's health and wellness expert, Dr Tasneem Batia, she was just saying that when a woman's hormones begin to shift from one phase of life to another, it is normal to suddenly feel really fatigued all the time, usually irritable, and to experience weight gain. So I asked Dr Taz if there are things women can do to prepare and lessen the severity of these symptoms as our hormones shift definitely, I think the number one thing women can do is to optimize their nutrition. If they have good levels of healthy fats, protein B, vitamins, magnesium, vitamin D, omega three fats. These hormone shifts are subtle. They're not noticeable, and then sort of the disease risk that they carry is also minimized. There's a reason for that. Every hormone, estrogen, progesterone, thyroid, insulin, is dependent on nutrients, first of all, to be produced, secondly, to be metabolized, and then lastly, to do what it's supposed to do in the body. So if we've had poor nutrition, from the get go, right from childhood through puberty, all the way through your 20s and 30s, then as you walk into a hormone shift at any of those stages that then we know that you're not going to be as prepared for those hormone shifts as someone who's nutritionally optimized. So I think really paying attention to your food and looking at things like, are you getting the right amount of protein in your diet? Are you getting enough healthy fats? Are you getting clean whole food sources of food so that hopefully your B vitamin load is where it needs to be, magnesium is where it needs to be, deep, Vitamin D is where it needs to be. And then really digging in to understand if you have deficiencies you know that might impact how you weather any one of the hormone shifts we've discussed. If your asthma gets worse every fall, try this. Stop raking leaves. That's because mold grows on fallen leaves and stirring them up releases spores into the air you're breathing, which can trigger an asthma attack if you absolutely have to rake wear an N 95 surgical mask while you're doing yard work. Today's medical term pain somnia, as you might guess, that's difficulty sleeping as a direct result of being in pain. And normally, what happens is you go to bed feeling fine. But then during the night, pain builds up until it becomes so severe that it wakes you up and keeps you awake until you finally do something about it, like take a pain pill. According to the Journal of pain, 88% of people living with chronic pain will experience pain somnia. So why does the pain come. Strong while you're sleeping? Well, the leading theory is that when we're awake, we always have some stress to deal with, which means we also have extra cortisol flowing through our body. And cortisol is a natural pain suppressant. But when we're asleep, our cortisol level drops, and if you've recently suffered an injury or have arthritis, all the pain signals that your stress has been masking suddenly come to the forefront and wake you up. Also, poor sleep is known to increase your sensitivity to pain, So painsomnia becomes a vicious cycle. That's why, if you frequently wake up hurting in the middle of the night, it is important to talk to a specialist who can help you get to the bottom of your pain and your sleep issues, and that's today's medical term, painsomnia coming up. We'll hear more from integrative medicine specialist, Dr Taz, author of The Hormone shift. She'll explain how simply staying hydrated can do wonders in helping to keep your hormones balanced, but first it feels good to give, and now we know that scientifically, helping others or giving financially literally triggers changes in the brain that makes us feel happy and content. Even thinking about helping others feels good. The University of Zurich conducted the research and gave study subjects $100 half the group was instructed to keep the money for themselves, the other half was asked to spend the money on others. Then both groups had their brains scanned. Well, the group that was told to be generous had increased brain activity in regions associated with reward, pleasure and happiness. But you don't have to give away every last cent or spend all your time sacrificing for others to get the feel good effects. Doing any generous, selfless act will make you feel happier and more content when it comes to staying healthy, of course, you should prioritize exercise, eating well and getting quality sleep, but a study from the University of Virginia shows our friends can be just as essential to a long, healthy life. For example, in the study, when people were asked to rate the difficulty of climbing a steep hill, they were much more likely to rate the hill as easy to climb if they were with a friend compared to people who climbed solo. That's because close friends provide a reliable support system for when we're stressed, making challenges seem easier, and the American Heart Association backs that up. They say having close friends is also associated with lowering our risk for everything from depression to heart attacks to even cancer. And research shows the opposite is true too. People reporting no close friends are among the most likely to suffer premature death. It's why experts say we should prioritize developing strong friendships. They're a powerful factor for living a longer, healthier, happier life. Okay, listen to this. Here's a red flag that you're listening to a liar. Their speech sounds more formal. When we're comfortable, we tend to use contractions like won't and don't, but lying takes more mental effort, according to psychiatrist Dr Alan Hirsch, so to buy ourselves a little more time to come up with a story, we're more than twice as likely to unconsciously switch to more formal phrases like will not and did not. So if someone starts avoiding normal conversational contractions, consider that a heads up back with more health intelligence from integrative medicine physician Dr Tasneem Batia, better known as Dr Taz, earlier, she said that when a woman's nutrition is optimized, it can lessen the impact of normal hormone changes and help lower the risk of getting sick. Research also shows a strong link between poor nutrition and a higher risk for anxiety and depression. So I asked Dr Tez to explain the connection. Let's think about this for just a second. So anxiety and depression are rooted in an imbalance of our neurotransmitters and our hormones, and the two, like everything in the body, are connected when we look at the breakdown of both of these, the neurotransmitters that make us feel good and our hormones that need to be balanced. Something like B vitamins is critical in both of those processes. So they're critical in making neurotransmitters, breaking them down, making hormones, breaking them down, as is magnesium. To me, those are two very important nutrients for women's health. When we don't have enough or it's not able to be absorbed, that's when we see women really suffer. We see them with symptoms of anxiety depression. We also see the hormone imbalances that go with anxiety and depression. So estrogen dominance, low, progesterone, thyroid instability, crazy, blood sugar. Or high cortisol, all of that. So the nutrients are really kind of Ground Zero. It's like trying to build a house but not having the fundamental foundational materials for the house, right? So the nutrients, to me, are like that. We've got to have the right nutrients on board, or we can't manage anxiety, depression, hormones, all of these other aspects of our health. Back with more health intelligence from Dr Taz, host of the popular Super Woman wellness podcast, and when it comes to boosting your health and wellness, whether you're a woman or a man, would you believe something as basic as drinking a glass of water can help? I asked Dr Taz why simply staying hydrated is so important. Well, hydration is super important for a lot of different elements, including how blood sugar works, how our insulin, which is another hormone, how that works, how we metabolize hormones and neurotransmitters. So when we're dehydrated, a couple of things are happening. First of all, we are hungrier. Secondly, you know, we may resort to behaviors that you know ultimately hurt our hormones. So instead of drinking water, if instead you're having a lot of high salt foods or high sugar foods or those type of things, then those actually impact the hormones in a negative way. On the other hand, hydrating will help to kind of keep the entire metabolic world happy. In terms of stabilizing blood sugar, stabilizing insulin, it also keeps blood pressure where it needs to be. So hydration plays into metabolic health. It plays indirectly into hormone health. But again, everything is connected so it interacts with each other. Don't bother stretching before a workout. Researchers at hull University in the UK found stretching cold muscles causes them to tighten, not relax, and that boosts the odds you'll injure yourself. Instead, it's better to warm up with two minutes of dynamic stretching like jumping jacks or arm or leg swings, which involve movement, unlike stationary stretching, dynamic stretching primes muscles for action and improves performance. Then, after you exercise, stretch the muscle groups that you actively worked on that will help prevent soreness by increasing blood flow and circulation so waste products are cleared away from those areas more easily, more intelligence for your health. From integrative medicine physician, Dr Taz. If you'd like to know more about her, check out Dr taz.com and she was in the news recently talking about a phenomenon known as medical gas lighting. For those who haven't heard of it, I asked Dr Tez to explain what it is and why it's potentially dangerous to our health, especially for women. Medical gas lighting is a term that more and more people are using these days, because it is describing the frustration that many women honestly are feeling when they go into the exam room, what most women are hearing, and this is what I'm hearing from patients when they come to me, is that doctors are telling them that they're normal, that they're just aging, that they're fine, that there's no reason to get their hormone levels checked. It's not beneficial or helpful to what's going on with them, that they're depressed, that they're just anxious, but not willing to jump in and to look at the whole picture. That's medical gas lighting. I think that women deserve more, and we deserve and we need medical providers that understand, as women, we're shifting. We're fluid. Things are interconnected, and these sort of like perfunctory answers aren't going to really do us any service. So if someone hears this and feels like their health symptoms are being dismissed or they're being gas lighted by their doctor, what do you recommend doing about it? I think many doctors today are not educated about hormone health. I think I, myself, was not until I sought this out, you know, as a mission. So we do want to give some grace to the medical community out there, when an education system that we go through doesn't really give us the information, but doctors that are collaborative and collegial, they will see information, they will take your notes, they'll listen to them, and they will act on them, more than likely, those that are more dogmatic and kind of walk between two lines and can't recognize the fluidity. You know, when it comes to women's health, they are probably doctors you're not going to be able to have a great working relationship with. So I think it's important to make sure you connect with your doctor. Make sure that the doctor understands where you're coming from. They may not know every single fact out there that is okay, but they need to be willing to have a collaborative relationship so that the two of you can navigate this journey together. A lot of people carry their stress in the jaw, but a clenched jaw can exert up to 300 pounds of pressure, which can wear teeth down. Down and crack them. And if you clench your jaw for years, it can eventually lead to arthritis, inflammation and deterioration of the jaw joint, not to mention lock jaw and TMJ. So try this simple, no cost solution. If you tend to clench your jaw, make a habit of resting your tongue against the ridge behind your upper front teeth, keeping your lips closed, according to TMJ expert, Dr Andrew Kaplan, that will naturally help your jaw open and remain at ease. And if you combine that move with this breathing pattern, it will be even better. Inhale through your nose for a count of four, hold it for another four seconds, exhale for eight seconds. So remember in for four, hold for four, exhale for eight that will calm your nervous system, relaxing you even more. Here's an email I received at Connie at intelligence for your health.com. It comes from Brian Miceli, who writes, How rare is it for someone to pass away on their birthday? Brian, it happens more than you may think. According to an analysis from the University of Chicago, we're nearly 7% more likely to die on our birthday. For people age 60 and older, that jumps to 14% but for young adults, and especially if your birthday lands on a weekend, the risk goes way up. For instance, for someone between the ages of 20 and 29 if their birthday falls on a weekend, their risk of dying shoots up 48% that's because people tend to get crazy on their birthdays. They may drink too much, party too hard, and put themselves in dangerous, risky situations. For the older population, it's usually down to over indulging with fatty food and alcohol, which could trigger a heart attack or stroke. Another theory is that people keep themselves going to reach an age milestone and then surrender to the inevitable, and suicides go up 3% on birthdays too. Dr Lewis Halsey of the University of Roehampton says more suicides happen on birthdays, particularly with men. He says men are more likely to make a statement about their unhappiness when they think people will notice, which is on their birthday. Thank you for your email. Brian, I hope this helps. Okay, listen to this. Here's a trick to help you get up in the morning, use a heating pad. Now you might think a heating pad would make you want to stay in bed longer, since it makes you warm and cozy, but sleep expert Dr Christopher winter says when our body temperature dips at night, it produces sleep hormones, and at dawn, our body temperature starts rising along with our stress hormones to wake us up naturally. So plug a heating pad into a timer, layer it between your blankets and set it to start heating up about 30 minutes before you need to get up, it will speed up the natural rise in your core temperature, helping you wake up if you need to have surgery, you may want to look for a female surgeon, because according to a new study, people who are operated On by female surgeons are less likely to experience complications, have shorter hospital stays and need less follow up care than when men perform surgery. The research was conducted by Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It reviewed more than 1 million patient records and found that patients seen by female surgeons had significantly better outcomes with fewer problems in the months after the surgery and when it came to death rates post surgery, female surgeons really had an edge. It turns out patients treated by female surgeons were 25% less likely to die one year after surgery than those treated by male surgeons. The reason female surgeons tend to operate more slowly and achieve better results by taking their time and being more careful and thorough. So although men have been considered better surgeons historically, if you have a choice between two equally qualified doctors, you may want to choose a woman to perform your surgery. More health intelligence from integrative physician Dr TAs in her latest book, The hormone shift, she breaks down the major phases of a woman's life and the distinct symptoms that women can expect with each phase, like when it's perfectly normal, to feel tired all the time, to feel more anxious or to suddenly gain more weight. But I asked Dr TAS if there are any symptoms we should pay attention to which might signal something's not normal and that we should see a doctor. You know, one of the things I really want women to. Understand or to pay attention to, is that if they're having any significant change, to not dismiss it. And that's something that I did. So for example, you know, when I was having my own hormonal imbalances and journey, like I was having massive hair loss, joint pain, feeling so tired, unable to get out of the bed, it was a very definite change how I am normally, but as I ignored it, the symptoms wouldn't go away. They would just escalate. So any escalation in symptoms, I think, needs to be checked out. Any new symptoms, right, that you know are not really something that you've experienced before, I think those automatically need to be checked out as well. So I think women need to get into a pattern, you know, and my hope is reading the book that they'll get there. They need to get into a pattern of having their mermaids checked at least twice a year, seeing their medical provider, having that medical provider really quarterback their care and understand, you know, and track and trend them so that the entire team can understand when a woman might be getting into trouble versus this is just something that can be watched over time. That's it for our show today, our special intelligence for your health with Connie Selig edition of the podcast, I'm Gib Gerard. Don't forget to rate comment and subscribe on Apple podcast. Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. It helps us out a lot. And also you can reach out to us on social media. All of our links are listed down in the show notes. We try to respond to every DM, every mention of the show, because ultimately, we do the show for you guys. So thank you so much for listening. You.