Ross Walter Nutritionist and Naturopath health articles and blog

How's your sleep?

24/8/2016

How's your sleep?! Are you waking up refreshed in the morning with plenty of energy throughout the day? If not, your sleep issues can be causing a lot of health problems (which is not really a laughing matter like the picture), and I see a lot of this in clients.

Sleep issues can lead to fatigue, irritability, poor memory and concentration, depression, weight gain and many chronic health conditions including cancer. To avoid these, you need to get good quality and quantity sleep regularly!

Investigating and resolving sleep issues is a major interest of mine, after having personal difficulties with this in the past, and being able to resolve them with simple but non-standard methods! I tried many of the usual techniques, which didn't work for me because they didn't address the causes.

There are 3 main issues people have regarding sleep:

Sleep onset - having difficulty initially getting to sleep
Sleep maintenance - difficulty staying asleep, or waking at similar times in the night and not easily being able to get back to sleep again
Interrupted sleep - this can be related to sleep maintenance too, but can be caused from other issues such as bladder problems and the need to visit the bathroom during the night, and having young children that need to be breastfed or looked after when sick or needing attention.

Some of the most common causes to sleep problems are from stress, weight issues, lifestyle factors (alcohol, caffeine, lack of exercise or sun exposure and more), and eating the wrong types of foods during the day and especially at dinner, or many other possible causes.

If you are having any of these issues, I'd love to be able to help to sleep better and to improve your health. I investigate all the possible causes of poor sleep in you, then I make some recommendations which can include some dietary changes, lifestyle improvements, environmental changes, supplements or many other techniques to resolve the causes.

Getting a good quality sleep can then make a huge improvement on your health!

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grains are fed to animals to fatten them up... get the irony?

18/8/2016

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If you read my articles regularly (see below) you will know that I am not a fan of whole grains such as wheat and corn as being a regular part of any healthy nutrition plan.

In short, the main reasons for this are:
1) Grains are high in carbohydrates, which get broken down in the body into glucose, causing high blood sugar spikes, high insulin response (to store the glucose as fat), and weight gain and diabetes
2) The government food guidelines are biased towards eating a massive amount of grains per day, for corporate profits, not from any scientific or health basis
3) The genetic modification of wheat and corn in particular, makes them "Roundup Ready", or splicing toxic bacterial genes into corn so the plant produces its own pesticides, which you then eat...
4) The GMO "Roundup Ready" wheat is laced with Roundup (aka glyphosate) which the World Health Organisation rated in early 2016 as a "probable carcinogen" based on many research studies
5) The genetic modification of wheat has led to a higher amount of gluten in wheat, rye and barley grain products. As we cannot break down gluten fully, we need bacteria and yeasts to do this, and bread-making used to be a fermented process to allow these microbes to reduce the gluten in breads and to make them more easily digested by us. This doesn't happen for the most part in modern baking, and high amounts of gluten are causing a LOT of digestive complaints and mental health disorders in particular
6) There are NO nutritional ingredients in grains which are not found in other foods, such as vegetables, nuts and seeds, and other foods. You won't miss anything by not having grains
7) GMO grains, soy, sugar, hormones, antibiotics, and other rubbish, to fatten them up, but somehow all of these things are allegedly healthy for you?!

Wheat, corn and many other grains are linked to diabetes, weight gain, fatigue, sleep issues, depression, neurological disorders (alzheimer's, parkinsons, multiple sclerosis etc), IBS and many other digestive and gut conditions, cancer, and most autoimmune conditions. If you have any of these conditions, you need to consider looking at how grains are possibly causing your health issues.

There are plenty of healthier alternatives to having wheat and corn products, and removing wheat and corn from your diet will improve your health in so many ways.

How have you noticed grains like wheat and corn affect you?

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constipation and what is a "normal" or healthy poo?!

14/8/2016

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One of the most common health problems I see in practice is constipation and the associated issues of gut pains and difficulty having a bowel movement. Up to 1 in 5 people are regularly affected by constipation. People don't generally come to me to fix their constipation as their main complaint, but I find that constipation is usually partly responsible for or associated with their other health problems. Luckily constipation is often fairly easy to resolve!

Constipation is simply the difficulty in passing your bowel motions, usually associated with hardened faeces. It also can mean the infrequent passing of a bowel motion from every 2-3 days to several weeks as some clients have experienced. This is NOT normal!

What is a "normal" poo? While "normal" will vary from one person to the next, a "healthy" poo should be:
- done every day
- easy to pass
- complete (your bowel should feel empty)
- medium brown in colour
- shaped like a sausage (not small, hard pebbles, corn-cob, or runny or diarrhoea)
- having an inoffensive smell (no, you shouldn't need to deodorise the room or repaint the walls afterwards!)

A healthy poo means a healthy digestive system, and a healthy body!

Regular constipation is not only painful, but it can make your health worse when waste products are reabsorbed back into the body from the large intestine, causing toxicity, inflammation, skin conditions, bad breath, fatigue, and other symptoms. Constipation predisposes you to all colorectal disorders including haemorrhoids, anal fissures and even colon cancer.

Constipation can have many causes, including a lack of fibre in the diet, stress, slow digestive system, imbalance of gut bacteria, hormonal factors, dehydration, medications, lack of exercise or a combination of these.

To clear constipation and return to a "normal" daily poo, the causes need to be identified and addressed. Laxative medications will not fix the causes and can result in more digestive problems and a reduced quality of life.

If constipation is an issue with you, it's nothing to be embarrassed about to ask for help and return to health!

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for weight loss, find and fix the causes, Not calories!

7/8/2016

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As a nutritionist and naturopath, I still see and hear of the common (mis)conception that to achieve weight loss, you need to eat less and exercise more, or to expend more calories in exercise than you take in as food... This is such an outdated and incorrect theory that it's hindering people who really want to improve their health. And to do this you supposedly need to count calories going in as food and calories expended as exercise. Who really has the time and dedication to do this?! I don't, and why I don't recommend this for anyone!

There are a great many causes of weight gain, and the only way to truly lose weight and keep it off is to find and address ALL of the possible causes in each person, in a personalised and holistic way. One person's weight gain will be due to eating the wrong foods for their body, but another person's weight gain will be due to stress, or inflammation, or artificial sweeteners and other "diet" products (which have NO calories - oh, the irony), poor sleep quality or quantity, toxins in chemicals in foods or environment, the contraceptive pill, medications, hormone conditions, exposure to artificial light, genetics, increasing age, imbalance of gut bacteria, use of antibiotics, and many more causes...

In reality, as I see in practice, weight gain is very much a combination of several or many of these factors, and NOT just about how many calories someone is eating or not expending.

Can you see yet that calories are irrelevant?

Someone can be eating the best diet possible together with regular exercise, but still put on weight because of these other factors! Simply eating the "right" foods and exercising more will not correct all of the possible causes of weight gain in most people! This is why diets don't work and people who follow the diet/exercise theory almost always gain their weight back again, after all their efforts.

Counting calories is a waste of time! It doesn't work to help anyone lose weight. Focus instead on getting some help and advice on a holistic and personalised plan for you! I'd love to help you improve your health!

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Does "leaky gut" cause autoimmune Conditions?

31/7/2016

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More and more of the health conditions I see in practice are what are known as "autoimmune" conditions. This means that your immune system is mistakenly attacking your own cells or organs as if they were a foreign bacteria or virus. With there being more than 80 known autoimmune conditions, is there anything that can be done for them? Yes!

Many autoimmune conditions can affect one specific organ, such as the pancreas (in type 1 diabetes), the bowel (in Coeliac disease, ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease), the joints (in rheumatoid arthritis) and many more. Some autoimmune conditions can affect multiple organs or the whole body such as SLE or "lupus".

The typical medical approach is to suppress the immune system function with medications (such as corticosteroids, anti-inflammatories or even chemotherapy) so it isn't attacking the body or organs as much. This creates some major problems as 1) this doesn't fix the cause of the problem, 2) these medications will cause side effects often worse than the condition itself, and 3) you NEED your immune system functioning properly to prevent infections, or else you will get frequent illnesses, symptoms of a worse condition or even cancer.

So how then can Naturopathy help? I work differently by finding the cause(s) of your autoimmune condition, of which there are several, including environmental triggers, poor digestive and immune system function, dietary choices, toxic chemical exposure, stress, hormones and infections. I can also look at getting a genetic test to see what genetic issues you may have which can be possible causes or hindering normal treatment. I develop a personalised treatment plan and work with you to resolve your specific causes, which is further helped by having the results of the genetic test. By clearing the causes, your symptoms will reduce and your health with greatly improve!

If you have any form of autoimmune condition, I would love to help you!

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How's your sleep?

grains are fed to animals to fatten them up... get the irony?

constipation and what is a "normal" or healthy poo?!

for weight loss, find and fix the causes, Not calories!

Does "leaky gut" cause autoimmune Conditions?

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