Dr Shmuel Shields on Balanced Eating and Core Supplements

[Music] I'd like to just start off with a couple of questions I'd like to ask you maybe before that was thrown off a little bit of still a little story this is a story of a speaker that went to an event and as his chauffeur was driving him there the chauffeur turned around and said to the speak to set to the speaker you know something I've seen you do your presentation a hundred times I think I can do it just as well as you okay so the speaker said really fine we'll switch places so the chauffeur sat in the back the speaker drove him to the event the chauffeur got up gave the presentation and it was spectacular it was so good he got a standing ovation at the end and just as he was about to leave the podium somebody in the audience raised the hand with a very difficult technical question and without batting an eyelash he said just to show you what an easy question that is I'm gonna let my chauffeur in the back of the room answer it okay so I hope my chauffeur is still back there okay and anyway I'd like to start off the talk tonight first of all you don't even know what I'm gonna talk about but I'm glad you came anyway but just the status might satisfy my curiosity I'd like to ask you the following questions please by a show of hands respond regardless of what your level of education is whether you completed junior high high school college master's doctorate post-doctorate how many people here through all the years of schooling they may have had learned in school how to safely change a flat tire anybody really okay a couple of people actually learned that amazing how many people here learned in school or knew when they came out of school the difference between a mutual fund and an annuity a stock a bond anybody learned that in school anybody come out with that knowledge probably not okay how many people here actually learned how to listen in school in other words listening is a skill it doesn't come automatically you have to be trained be a good listener and you might have learned how to read and how to write we probably didn't learn how to speak in school what to listen but these are critical skills that really are very important to our personal and professional success in life our relationships hinge on being good listeners and nevertheless it's something we're really not trained in it's something we really don't learn in school and there's a big difference between listening and hearing hearing is automatic as soon as a baby is born it hears but to learn how to listen is really a skill the last question I'd like to ask you was this how many people here learned how to eat properly in school how to have a healthy nutritious lifestyle how to have a healthy lifestyle probably never learned that probably never really got into in school some what I'm trying to point out not to fall to the educational system in any way but there are a lot of practical important lifelong skills that were never taught in school no matter how many years you've been in school learning how to eat well how to be healthy it's probably not part of the picture anyway I could help you maybe with the last pot I'm the author of a book called lehayim 18 chapters to live by it was written for the Jewish community you know Brooke Hashem it's been successful people have benefited people have changed their lives from the book more importantly people have enjoyed reading it because it's a very readable practical book with stories and a lot of interesting things that people can learn from it's based on my 25 years of experience as a clinician as a practicing nutritionist I have it available here for a book signing at the end if anybody's interested each chapter is devoted to different aspects of health nutrition how to get a good night's sleep hard health how to keep your brain healthy how to reduce your stress all from a Torah framework with some very nice house comers from many leading row Bunim so I hope it might be of interest to you or it might be interest of interest to a child a family member a friend relative a neighbor a wonderful gift item it's over 200 pages and I think you would get a lot out of it so please keep that in mind I have some literature that you can take at the end some promotional literature and also for coming tonight I prepared a very special page on tips for healthy eating which I'll talk to a little bit more about basically for those of you that are interested in good health and maintaining your health there is a particular way of eating today that almost all the scientific research and studies have documented as being probably the best way of eating now you know there are a lot of different schools of thought out there when it comes to nutrition and a lot of different things that people do and try and believe in but I can tell you based on my experience and based on the current research the Mediterranean way of eating seems to top the list in terms of reducing the risks of you know cardio that having better cardiovascular health reducing the risk of a lot of illnesses that are very common in today's world so I prepared a page for you that you can take highlighting some of the basic concepts of the Mediterranean way of eating so I hope you'll benefit from that so that's one thing I want you to take so what today is wrong with the way we eat basically the the focus of the talk today is really how to integrate diet I don't like to use the word diet matter of fact I never in 25 years of practice have put anybody on a diet first of all diets don't work anybody who's been on a diet knows they will often lose weight but most people will regain the weight and then some also if you ever looked at the first three word first three letters of the word diet okay it's not such a good connotation there so so basically I don't recommend diets but I do recommend a healthy outlook and a healthy lifestyle and if your focus is on being healthy then your eating choices and the things you do will probably be better ones as well I just want to share with you a quote in the book of the varam the Torah writes Finnish martim me old enough so safe him which can be translated to mean you should God your souls very carefully and the Torah to Mima refers to Talmudic discussions both in breathless and Sanhedrin to elucidate how this first in fact teaches the importance of guarding our bodies and our health so really that's what we're trying to do I want to just share with you one other quote this is in the mission of Brugha the mr. Brewer is citing the SH law our Kaddish he says a person should eat and drink only to give support and to give health to his body to prepare for the service of the nefesh and by doing this every one of his meals is a Suda's Mitzvah imagine that if you are in tension when you sit down to eat is to nourish your body so you'll enable the neshamah that hashem blessed us with to be able to fulfill its mission right because you need the neshamah needs a vehicle it needs a healthy body and without a healthy body we're incapable of doing the mitzvahs so our vote Asajj shem is really contingent on having a healthy body so we have an obligation responsibility to the body and to the neshamah to keep the body healthy so the neshamah the nephesh could do the avodah session and and that's really why if you if you think about it why does an animal eat an animal eats out of instinct it feels hungry and those that has to fill his gut so that's why an animal eats a human being though hopefully can take eating to a highest spiritual level and when we do we we should think of the main purpose of eating and the main purpose of guarding our health is so that we should have the health and the strength be able to serve Hashem so if a person thinks about this before he eats while he's eating so as the missionary Brewis states here citing the SH law then the actual meal becomes a Sudha's Mitzvah every mouthful every bite is a mitzvah and by the way this pertains to everything we do if we go out to exercise what's the purpose of exercising the same thing to strengthen the body so we can serve Hashem before going to sleep at night if we have the thought in our mind we're sleeping now so we can be well rested so we can get up and do mitzvahs the next day so then even even the hours of sleep become a mitzvah in itself if we have the right qivana the right intention when we do these things so hopefully leaving here tonight maybe we can reflect on this and when we sit down for a meal or a snack we can have a higher purpose in mind okay having said that I'd like to go back to just some things I want to give tips I want to give you one of the problems today with our eating is that we moved away we've steered away from a whole food diet all of the cultures in the world if we look back to traditional eating of any culture it was always based on a whole food diet you go back a hundred years 200 years any part of the world you go to people who ate their traditional diets no matter what they were were basically healthy diets there are tribes in Africa today that still eat exclusively red meat so you would you would think that they would have terrible cardiovascular health now that's the primary food they eat nothing else red meat and nevertheless they have very good cardiovascular health because the red meat that they're eating is coming from animals that are wild that are eating their natural diets they're eating greens they're grazing on grass they're eating the things they're supposed to eat so when an animal eat eats what it's supposed to eat the nutrients and the animal's body are there and then we benefit from those nutrients as well nowadays animals we've disturbed that the food chain animals are supposed to eat a certain way a cow is not supposed to be grain fed it's not supposed to eat cornmeal cow was supposed to egress that's the natural diet of a cow and if you think about it it's pretty amazing just by munching on that grass a cow is able to develop a massive body it's able to get all the calcium it needs for its bones all the nutrients it needs by consuming its natural diet it's also interesting to note that grass greens or a source of omega-3 oil not much but they do have some so when a cow eats greens its body the meat on its body now contains some omega-3 which protects the heart and the blood vessels so when a cow is not eating what it's supposed to be eating then those nutrients are missing and we don't benefit we lose out so and by the way you can get grass-fed meat today it's available I'm still not advocating eating it in tremendous amounts but if you're gonna eat red meat so you have a better sauce and the grass-fed meat from what I've seen has less fat has lower cholesterol levels in the meat it has a higher iron content it has more omega-3 than the other types of meat so it does become nutritionally a better choice as far as that goes when it comes to oils and fats in the diet there's a lot of confusion many people think it's best to be fat free and many of the foods today have had all the fats removed you can get fat free bread fat free yogurt it's fat-free cookies fat free cake so people think those are healthy the truth is we need fat fat is an essential part of our diet we need the right kind of fats the problem today is we're eating the wrong kind of fats and that's really what the problem is the right kind of fats are found in the Mediterranean way of eating monounsaturated fats coming from things like olives olive oil nuts and sea avocado fish the omega-3 oil that's in the fish these are healthy essential fats fats are not a luxury they're an essential nutrient essential ingredient that our bodies need and if we have the right kind of fats it can protect us against certain cancers against heart disease and and many other ailments and so on so that becomes very important another problem today is the wrong kinds of carbohydrates processed carbohydrates processed starches with a lot of the essential nutrients taken out and also too much sugar too much salt too much protein another thing I'd like to mention is that I'm looking at a book now called it all starts with food in that book they mentioned something very interesting use your imagination for a second imagine you're going down a steep hill in your car or on a bicycle or a motorcycle whatever you want to envision and all of a sudden is you need to apply the brakes and they're not working no brakes kind of a scary feeling some of you people some people in the audience may have had that experience it's a very scary feeling well I'll tell you something what's happened with our foods today there are no brakes the food manufacturers have removed the brakes that prevent us from overeating foods let me give you an example most people here can easily eat their favorite box of cookies am i right not too hot if you like the cookies you're eating you could sit down polish off 5 10 15 cookies no problem a big bag of potato chips no problem pretzels no problem and the list goes on and on and on the manufacturers have taken the breaks out of those foods once they remove the breaks meaning the fiber and the other nutrients and those foods that normally fill us we can't stop and we can't say she ate ourselves for exam we could eat a lot of cookies but you can't sit down and easily eat six or seven or eight apples you can't polish off I had a cabbage too easily you can't eat six or seven sweet potatoes too easily because those foods the ravenna shaloom put breaks into those foods he put ingredients and mechanisms into all the whole foods that prevent you from over indulging and overeating and the Rambam says very clearly that the main source of almost all disease is overeating stuffing the stomach and bad foods that's the combination that the Rambam cites as being the major primary cause of many health problems that we see today and in the past as well the Rambam even goes as far to say better a little bit of a bad food than too much of a good food in other words a little bit of a maybe an unhealthy food and the eyes of the Rambam is better then too much of a good food isn't that amazing so the best combination would be to eat less and to try to eat healthy foods if you eat healthy foods you'll be able to eat less because these foods have the breaks that the Reeb initial important to the foods they will fill you they will satiate you and that's why it's important to try to stick with the right foods so that makes the best I'll tell you now for coming tonight I'm going to give you a secret about the best exercise in the world the best exercise in the world is pushing yourself away from the table okay so so if you could do that the Rambam says eat until you're about three-quarters full in other words you still feel you can eat there's still room there that's the best time to leave the table before you overeat and gorge and so on and I'll tell you there are many health consequences to overeating I personally know a friend who told me his father passed away he had a heart attack right after eating a heavy meal he suffered a heart attack and there are a certain percentage of heart attacks that have been connected with overeating and and so on so overeating is really one of the worst things we can do and the Rambam said this eight hundred years ago and it holds true today is it's a universal truth and principle that we're first realizing okay let me give you a couple of other points the soil that foods are grown on today is not that great you know the agricultural industry doesn't let the land lay fallow every seven years like we do it's interesting to note that every seven years the soil gets depleted and by allowing the land to lay fallow like the Torah commands us to do the soil has a chance to replenish the nutrients that were taken out of it by the crops that were grown on it over those last number of years so we can see this is a very important principle what they do in modern agriculture today obviously they don't stop but they just replenish the soil with artificial chemicals or fertilizers or things to try to get things to keep growing so we don't have the best soil and things like that and then of course there's handling and transportation of foods do you know that when a head of spinach gets pulled out of the ground some ways in the Midwest one day after that head of spinach is pulled out of the ground it loses 50% of his vitamin C content so what happens to the typical head of spinach it gets pulled out of the ground that goes onto a truck into a warehouse makes its way to the supermarket it sits there for a couple of days you buy that head of fresh quote fresh spinach sits in your refrigerator for two three days by the time you eat that head of spinach it could be two weeks old and then once it's caught cooked exposed to light air heating whatever is done to it there were continuous losses of nutrients so even though you think you're eating healthy and eating spinach is certainly healthy I'm not saying you're not getting anything out of the spinach but you there's a lot that's been lost a hundred years ago when your great-grandparents grew a head of spinach organically in the backyard and pulled it out it was on the table that night they didn't have refrigeration on the table that night and you got the maximum nutritional value out of it okay so I cited some of the problems today the truth of the matter is we can greatly improve our nutrition by avoiding the traps I just mentioned sticking with Whole Foods trying to do the right thing when it comes to making food choices and so on and trying to build in some of the Mediterranean principles as you'll get in that handout basically keeping the diet colorful colorful fruits and vegetables healthy fats using meats and proteins as a side dish instead of a main dish cutting back on sugars avoiding you know white flour products sticking with whole grains and so on and so forth you'll see the Mediterranean principles a very very sound very balanced and they work and the results have been there and the studies show that they do get results now I wanted to talk a little about supplements so let's say we are eating as well as we can we're following these Mediterranean principles by the way they say that frozen vegetables are probably more nutritious today than the fresh because when they pull the head of spinach out and they're gonna freeze it they flash freeze it right away so the nutrients are better preserved so you may want to think of using you know fresh and frozen but frozen carry a lot of weight in today's world as well canned are not as good I prefer probably frozen over can due to the salt and sugar content and even the ingredients in the canning and stuff like that made be a drawback but I would say that if that's the only way a person would eat vegetables I would say go for it you know what I mean but if it's convenient and it and you can't and you do that's a good way to get them in so it's probably better than not eating them let me just what I'd like to do we'll leave a few minutes at the end for some questions and comments I'd like to talk a little about supplements now so based on we have these good healthy eating principles now as I just discussed the question is what role should supplements play if any well as I mentioned to you earlier even if you're eating very healthy you could still have nutritional deficiencies we need many many different nutrients on a daily basis what they call macronutrients micronutrients nutrients we need in large amounts like calcium potassium magnesium and then we have trace minerals micronutrients like selenium iodine copper things that we need small amounts of but we need these nutrients on a daily basis for every nutrient you might become deficient in if the deficiency holds up for a long enough period of time it will ultimately lead to some disease in the body we all know if you don't get enough calcium it's going to affect the bones if you don't get enough magnesium you diet it could affect the cardiovascular system and if you don't get enough beta-carotene or lutein it could affect your eyes and you could be more prone to macular degeneration cataracts glaucoma and so on and so forth so every nutrient will affect the organs and the body in some way if we're not getting an optimal amount of that that nutrient many people today are deficient in different nutrients and that's what I want to talk about right now I want to just sort of conclude the talk with what I call core nutrients when I say what I mean by core nutrients they're important ones as they all are but these are hard to get or more challenging to get even if you're eating well and these are ones that people are more prone to be deficient in so I'm gonna give you a little overview of some of the core nutrients it's not necessarily an exhaustive list and it's just general information it could be many things that people could be deficient in but in my practice and based on my research the one number one that stands out way on the top of the list vitamin D as in David some people in this room may have had their vitamin D levels checked I would assume that many people have found that they probably low and don't have enough vitamin D vitamin D they've discovered is really not a vitamin it's a hormone and there are many receptor sites throughout the body many organs and systems in the body that need vitamin D so if you're not getting enough those organs and those systems will will suffer vitamin D has been linked I should say vitamin D deficiency has been linked to increased risk for cardiovascular disease certain cancers bone and joint problems an impaired immune system and the list goes on and on and on there are many many things that vitamin D is very vital for most people are not getting enough this is where we'll take questions in a little while this is where a supplement could play a very valuable role to you okay I have I've designed some of my own supplements and I tried to be careful to include things in them that are normally hard to get so vitamin D for example I have included in larger amounts of my supplements because I know it's a little bit harder to get there's another nutrient that you're probably a little less familiar with it's called vitamin K now most people when they think of vitamin K they think of something called vitamin k1 which is found in leafy greens and the main function of vitamin k1 is it helps the blood to clot but there's also another form of vitamin K is also essential for us it's called vitamin k2 and vitamin k2 plays a very interesting role one of the roles of vitamin k2 it does help in the bone building process but more importantly the way it helps is that it keeps calcium in the bones if you don't have an adequate amount of vitamin k2 calcium can come out of the bones and wind up in the soft tissue or in the blood vessels and as people age they basically turn to stone they suffer from calcification of the blood vessels it's a very common and very problematic condition it's very possible that with an adequate vitamin k2 intake it's possible that we could maybe prevent that process maybe even reverse that process but where do we find vitamin k2 we find vitamin k2 in animal foods animal proteins the problem in today's world as I mentioned earlier is that animals are not being fed what they should be fed so the vitamin k2 that should be there may not be there that becomes a problem some of the more common foods that have vitamin k2 they're really not so common they are found in certain fermented soy products there's a famous Japanese food a fermented soy food called natto I think it's spelled na tto but it doesn't go too well with the American palate doesn't maybe taste as good so most people really don't make it part of their their eating regimen but in Japan it's eaten regularly and it contains a very large amount of vitamin k2 it's interesting to note that the Japanese who follow their traditional Japanese diet have a much higher or a much better level of health and many of the modern countries Western countries do their traditional diet is a very healthy diet and it does contain a good amount of k2 and they have excellent bone health despite the fact that dairy is really not a traditional part of it of the Asian or the Japanese diet they do they don't that kids don't grow up on the traditional diet drinking four or five or six or whatever glasses of milk a day that we're supposed to drink and despite all the calcium that we have in our diet the milk and the cheese and the yogurt and the pizza and the ice cream and all the calcium supplements that people swallow our bones are falling apart many people have osteopenia which is a precursor Tosti or / OSIS and so on and so forth and nevertheless in japan things like heart disease process cancer of the prostate breast cancer and bone problems really don't exist for those japanese that maintain their traditional way of eating when the japanese come to this country and they adopt a Western diet a western lifestyle they get the same exact diseases and at the same ages as we tend to get them so we could see something very interesting happening that there are certain cheeses believe it or not that a cultured in a certain way that they can sitt contain some vitamin k2 one of them that I've heard of recently is something called gouda cheese I heard also that brie cheese's may contain vitamin k2 and somebody told me recently that at Adam Adam cheese is random Adam yeah there's another cheese that may contain it but I saw some sources for Gouda it may have to be researched a little bit more but other than the fermented jam I'm sorry the fermented Japanese foods natto miso may have a little bit that's another fermented Japanese food product tempeh is another fermented Japanese soy food product that may contain a little bit and then it's possible that some of the grass-fed animals may contain some vitamin k2 and then there were supplements that people can take that contain vitamin k2 it's something that I included in all my supplements because I felt based on my research that people were somewhat deficient in it we are not eating fermented foods like we used to eat people used to make sauerkraut the sauerkraut we get today is not made the same way although there might be some companies out there that do make it in a more traditional way and and you may get it that way you may get other good things from the sauerkraut not necessarily vitamin k2 but that brings me to the next core supplement is something called probiotics friendly bacteria billions if not trillions of bacteria healthy friendly good bacteria are supposed to be living in our gut unfortunately most people have what they call a dysbiosis we have the the bed or the unfriendly bacteria has gotten the upper hand and the good bacteria is really not in the amounts of should be and when that happens it could affect a lot of things in the body it could affect immune health digestive health and the list goes on and on so I would say that once again this is another area where you mate in today's world you may have to rely on a supplement again I'm talking coarse supplements things that you can't easily get from foods you could eat yogurt the commercial yogurts put in some probiotics maybe not that much usually they come with a lot of sugar also and other ingredients but there are there are some good quality probiotic supplements that could fill a gap for you in this area omega-3 another essential nutrient that unless you're eating fish a couple of times a week you could have a deficiency in omega-3 so either you could eat more fish or you could maybe take a supplement if you can't eat fish you don't like fish there are omega-3 supplements and the last nutrient I want to talk about very briefly is vitamin b12 as we get older it becomes harder to absorb vitamin b12 from the foods we have lower hydrochloric acid levels in the stomach which is needed to separate or extract the b12 from the foods that it's in and therefore you can get tested get your blood levels tested for vitamin D for b12 and if you're deficient you could either get b12 injections or you can get a high dose of vitamin b12 in a supplement form you know your doctor could maybe advise you on the amount but if it's the dose is high enough over time it could bring your blood levels up of b12 if you b12 is deficient if you're low in b12 it could affect your cognition it could affect your memory it could affect your cardiovascular health you know many implications to a low b12 level I even heard it said once that a severe deficiency in b12 could create symptoms that look like Alzheimer's and it might be nothing more than a b12 deficiency but maybe it wasn't checked so that's why these levels should be checked don't assume that you went to the doctor and they did blood work that everything was checked many times b12 or vitamin D levels I'm not checked so you have to ask your doctor to please check those ok so I would say just to wind up the talk and maybe take some questions or comments you have the Mediterranean principles for good eating and you have the core supplements that I just mentioned that would hopefully make your nutritional program more comprehensive I do have some information on the table there we'll take questions first at the end you're well to take some of the handouts I have and you could look at some of the supplements I also have the book there and let's open up to maybe some questions before I do that I just want to just briefly announce for those that are watching for anybody that may want to contact me with a question or comment they can reach me at seven one eight five four four four zero three six the email addresses Aras and Robert Emma's and Michael shields s.h.i.e.l.d s62 at Verizon dotnet okay let me yeah okay so the four four four vitamin k2 the repeat I think the the RDA they recommended daily amount I believe is about eighty to a hundred micrograms which is not a lot not a lot I have a multivitamin supplement called vitae shield which I have it's been available for about eight years I've changed the formula three times in the last eight years to try to keep up with the latest research I currently have 60 micro grams of vitamin k2 also I want to let you know there is different forms of vitamin k2 there's something called MK 4 and MK 7 MK 7 is the natural form and it stays in the blood for a longer period of time than the MK 4 so that's the one I used in a supplement that I formulated but I would say you're not looking for a lot but the recommended daily amount is is about 80 micrograms okay and vitamin D right now the recommended daily amount the RDA as they call it is 400 international units which most experts believe is way below what it should be how'd it I can't really advise you on what would be an optimal range for you because everybody's different but if you get your blood levels checked your doctor may be able to advise a program to get you beat the levels up if they're low and then you have to think of a maintenance dose I would say that 800 to a thousand IU's of vitamin D might be a better range to be in some people may require more than that it all depends on how well you absorb it and how it might look on your blood tests and the one a day that I have I do have a thousand international units of vitamin d3 keep in mind the d3 is better absorbed than the d2 so that's what you're looking for in a supplement d3 and I want to just mention one other thing I've seen some research which I want to continue to research that taking a lot of vitamin D without having the k2 could be a problem also because they all work together see a lot of times we just focus in on single nutrients when there's always a synergistic effect with nutrients and you know working together and sometimes you can create an imbalance or create more of a problem by loading up on one and not recognizing how they're dependent on others so things like calcium magnesium d3 and k2 all work together to build bone and to keep calcium where it should be that's why I created a bone formula that contains all of those nutrients to try to make it more comprehensive and give it more of a synergistic effect okay let's someone who didn't have a question or comment yet anybody else yeah god no no potassium is a what we call a macro mineral it's a mineral that the body requires in very large amounts as a matter of fact the body requires more but more the largest amount of mineral in the body is really potassium the requirement is something like 35 hundred milligrams a day whereas calcium is only about a thousand milligrams a day so we need a lot more potassium that then calcium even but it sits in a very important mineral as well for cardiovascular health and blood pressure and and so on okay again you what you got to put things in perspective the foods we eat the quality of the sleep that we get the exercise that we do is the IKAR and the supplements of the Tuffle the I mentioned core supplements because I don't believe in people taking a lot of supplements I'll just tell you a story in my practice I once had a man I anytime I counsel anybody I tell him bring in whatever supplement you're taking I want to see what you're taking so one guy came in it's a true story I think I wrote it up in my book also he came in with a suitcase he put it on my desk he opened it up there were 40 bottles in there so the first question I had for him is how long does it take you to swallow those pills he said I spent 20 minutes a day imagine 20 minutes sitting down every day in swallowing pills and then I had that it piqued my curiosity I had to see what he was taking so I looked at every bottle and I just tell you one thing he took he took he was taking a green tea supplement you know the green tea leaf ground up into a powder in a capsule so he had a green tea a green leaf green tea supplement he was taking a garlic supplement he was taking fish oil supplement he was taking ginkgo biloba his doctor also had him on aspirin now does anybody know what those things all have in common blood thinners right so I said to him do you know that you're taking a lot of things that thin the blood they don't get me wrong there's nothing wrong with having the blood a little thinner anti-clotting things like that a little bit of garlic beautiful but I said you're taking a lot of things that all have the same mechanism including the aspirin that the doctor gave you and he said to me you know something I've been having a lot of nosebleeds lately and and he even told me that one time he has such a bad nosebleed he had to go to the hospital and even in the hospital they had trouble stopping it they had that one sort of balloon in his nose and blow it up to prevent the bleeding stop the bleeding so I said to him well that's you know you're overdoing it I would cut back on the these blood thinners I would let your doctor know what you're taking and I'll even get like a clotting you know there's a blood clotting test you can get to see how quickly your blood clots and so on so all I could say as many people do self supplement they read something in a Health magazine they go into a store somebody tells them this and before you know it every week they're coming home with more bottles what I try to do or what I advise people is to be very prudent when it comes to supplements to really just try to use them in a sensible way to get you know good quality supplements less is better than more sometimes that's why I've tried to modify or update my formulas based on the research either by lesson ingredients or increase ingredients that kind of thing but but really when that's was the main purpose of my talk tonight is to focus in what I think of some of the core things many other things you can get from good food from you know if you're better if you're choosing better foods you could satisfy a lot of nutritional needs through a better diet but there are areas that I mentioned probiotics vitamins e k2 omega-3 and b12 where people could fall short and this is where supplements may help fill an important gap for you so but you're bringing up a good point any other comments or questions yeah no no you are still growing bone every 7 years you get a brand-new skeletal system and the truth is bones a living tissue then that rocks in your body bones are constantly being the bone cells a dying being bones are constantly being worn worn out one away and the body is constantly regenerating bone tissue in order for you to build healthy bone tissue regardless of what age what a slow bone loss you need there are there are nutritional factors there are exercise factors that can help you with with bone health and bone density okay even weight bearing exercises at any age as far as I know will increase bone density okay they know when astronauts go up in space they come down they see they've lost bone mass because they're floating there's no gravity there's no force on the skeletal system so we need a certain amount of force on the skeletal system to help build build you know the better bone density and we need we need the right nutrients to help build healthy bone bone tissue and and that's where vitamin Z the k2 the magnesium calcium you know and then there are many trace minerals and protein and even vitamin C that all play a role in the complicated rebuilding of bone anybody the lights are shining on me I can't see in the back is there anybody in the back there that has a question I can't see your hands so if you want to just anybody behind this light back here okay it's in all the foods that most people eat every day unless you're vegetarian is in fish chicken meat turkey eggs it's in dairy products but even though you're eating these foods every day you can still be deficient because as I said as you get older there's something called intrinsic factor a certain mechanism in the stomach the hydrochloric acid that extracts b12 and if you don't have enough of that you could be deficient so your doctor should check your levels also keep in mind that there's a range on b12 its thoughts may be down in the lower 200s it may go to a thousand on the lab test you want to be like at least in the middle of the range if you're on the lower end it may not be that great either so you want to get a little bit higher up in that range yeah in foods okay so it's not in that many foods I mentioned certain cheese's certain fermented soy products animal proteins meat chicken things like that but because of how animals are raised nowadays and without the right foods and their diet whether the vitamin k2 is really there is questionable the body can sometimes convert I think the vitamin k1 which you get from leafy greens into k2 but you may not get enough of a conversion to give you the amounts that you might need so a supplement may be important the only people people that have to be a little bit cautious about vitamin K either k1 or k2 or any kind of case supplement or even Kayne foods is people who are on coumadin because the vitamin K s do are antagonistic to the drug coumadin so if you're taking the drug coumadin you have to really be very careful and discuss with your doctor about your food or vitamin intake when it comes to the vitamin K vitamins yeah okay so if somebody is pregnant they should really be in touch closely with their doctor the doctor should hopefully you know suggest a good quality prenatal and the prenatal should also contain some omega-3 fish oil I think they might recommend the D H DHA but you should look into that with your doctor and it should be at least a good prenatal with some either fish oil as part of it or a separate omega-3 fish oil that would be appropriate for someone who's who's pregnant I would say when it comes to wild a farmed wild would be a better choice although they say that even in the farmed I know there are problems with with farmed fish but they also still have the omega-3 content so it's you might be able to argue the point that the benefits may still outweigh the risks even informed but I would still be you know I wouldn't go overboard with the farm that would try to use more of the wild when you can most of the canned salmon maybe 80% of it is wild where most of the fresh salmon you buy about 80% of it is formed so but you know the main thing is is to get different kinds of fish in and to try to eat more fish tuna is the only one I caution people about in terms of its being a higher mercury containing fish so if you switch if instead of eating the tuna you switch the sardines or salmon or mackerel or herring of some other kind of fish to replace the tuna those would be me you know probably better choices to avoid the mercury I want to just conclude on a certain note that I was thinking about today this is a little bit of a switching topic again I'll be around at the end for the book signing if anybody might be interested or questions on the supplements their handouts there there were three handouts there's a card if you want to me but I'd like to conclude on a different note we're all very aware of the terrible tragedies that are taking place in the richest rule every day I don't know how it couldn't affect everybody in some way heart-wrenching tragedies and I recently heard a talk from a rabbi Dovid Goldwasser and he said that a lot of times we feel helpless and what we can do but the truth is he said that even a small act was something we take on could make a difference a big difference so I'd like to conclude by having us maybe think of something we could do I'm talking something on a spiritual level it could mean maybe some extra learning it could be an extra capital to hell him you say during the day giving extra sadaqa schmear a solution anything you could think of anything you can do don't think it won't make a difference because it will test said I would try I'm just gonna ask that we all contemplate for a little while now before we leave some extra mitzvot something we could do that would be asked us for our brethren and heritage role so I'm hoping before we leave we can just all make some commitment to something darvany with more qivana you pick something that you feel you want to work on adieu and I think that would be a good way to conclude this talk I want to thank everybody again for coming I'll be here I'm gonna go over to the table over there for anybody that wanted once the talk further it might be interested in the book or any other information that we have on the table okay thank you again for coming out all the best [Applause]