Dr. Shmuel Shields on Health for Chazaq

[Music] welcome everybody uh first of all I want to uh thank you all for coming out on such a cold night um I appreciate that and I want to um thank the rebun for allowing me to be here because uh last week I came down with a little bit of laringitis and I was concerned that I would be okay to do this talk I was afraid I was going to have to call you Eve and he would have to do the talk for me but uh in any event uh you know I'm feeling better enough to do the talk so they help I took my vitamins and they helped right um I also want to just uh express my AAR satov to this wonderful organization called kazak uh we're all very familiar with it and um one of the things I can tell you about this organization is that they definitely have seaya because it's beyond the T what they do to be able to do the amount of programming they do you know yev doesn't have a staff of 2,000 uh but uh miraculously he's able to uh provide uh through his organization continuous programming quality programming G Torah people from all over the world come he unites kazak unites the community they bring us out for all different kinds of events and uh we really owe them a tremendous AAR to for all the wonderful things they do for cl so they should have physic and they should be able to continue to do the things they keep doing and of course I want to thank uh the sh bit yahu for allowing us to use their space tonight and for the technical crew here that are helping us out uh so thank you all okay I'd like to just start off with um a couple of questions I'd like to ask you uh maybe before that we'll start off with a little bit of a little story this is a story of a speaker that went to an event and as his chauffer was driving him there the chauffer turned around and said to the speak uh said to the uh speaker you know something I've seen you do your presentation a 100 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 chauffer sat in the back the speaker drove him to the event the chauffer 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 their 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 going to let my chauffer in the back of the room answer it okay so I hope my shauer is still back there okay any anyway um I'd like to start off the talk tonight first of all you don't even know what I'm going to talk about but I'm I'm Glad You Came anyway um but just to satisfi satisfy my curiosity I'd like to ask you the following questions please by a show of hands respond um regardless of what your level of education is whether you completed junior high high school college Masters doctorate postdoctorate 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 um how many people here learned in school or knew when they came out of school the difference between a mutual fund an annuity a stock a bond anybody learned that in school anybody come out with that in knowledge probably not okay how many people here actually learned how to l listen in school in other words listening is a skill doesn't come automatically you have to be trained to 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 or 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 school um 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 uh the last question I'd like to ask you is 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 it probably never really got into it in school from what I'm trying to point out not to fault the educational system in any way but there are a lot of practical important life long skills that were never taught in school no matter how many years you've been in school um learning how to eat well how to be healthy is probably not part of the uh the picture anyway I could help you maybe with the last part uh I I'm the author of a book called L 18 chapters to live by it was written for the Jewish community 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 uh with stories and a lot of interesting things that people can learn from uh it's based on my 25 years of experience as a clinician as a practicing nutritionist I have it available here for a uh book signing at the end if anybody's interested each chapter is devoted to different aspects of Health Nutrition how to get a a good night's sleep heart health how to keep your brain healthy how to reduce your stress uh all from a Torah framework with some very nice Hamas from many um leading ranam 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 a relative a neighbor a wonderful gift item uh it's over 200 pages and I think you 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 and also for coming tonight I prepared a very special page on tips for healthy eating uh which I'll talk to you a little bit more about uh basically uh 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 uh research the Mediterranean way of eating seems to top the list in terms of reducing the risks of you know cardiov having better cardiovascular health reducing the risk of a lot of illnesses that are very common in today's world um so I prepared a p page for you that you can take are highlighting some of the basic concepts of the Mediterranean way of eating so I hope you'll benefit from that uh so that's one thing I 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 um also if you ever looked at the first three words first three letters of the word diet okay it's not such a good U connotation there so so basically I 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 um I just want to share with you a quote in the book of D the Torah writes which can be translated to mean you should guard your souls very carefully and the Torah tamim refers to talmudic discussions both in bras and Sanhedrin to elucidate how this verse in fact teaches the importance of guarding U our bodies and our health so really that's what we we're trying to do uh I want to just share with you one other quote um this is in the mission Brewer the Mr Brewer is citing the sches 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 nefes and by doing this every one of his meals is a sudas Mitzvah you imagine that if your intention when you sit down to eat is to nourish your body so you'll enable the Nish that Hashem blessed us with to be able to fulfill its mission right because you need your theama needs a vehicle it needs a healthy body and and without a healthy body we're incapable of doing the Mitzvah so our hasem is really contingent on having a healthy body so we have an obligation a responsibility to the body and to the Nish to keep the body healthy so the Nish the nees could doem 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 it knows it has to fill his gut so that's why an animal eats a human being though hopefully can take eating to a higher spiritual level and when we do weat 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 to be able to serve asem so if a person thinks about this before he eats while he's eating so as the Miss breu States here citing the schw then the actual meal becomes a s Mitzvah every mouthful every B 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 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 Mitzvah the next day so then even even the hours of sleep become a Mitzvah in itself if we have the right cavana 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 100 years 200 years any part of the world you go to uh 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 that 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 e eats what it's supposed to eat the nutrients in the animal's body are there and then we benefit from those nutrients as well nowadays animals we've Disturbed we the 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 is supposed to eat grass 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 are 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 um 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 going to eat red meat so you have a better source 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 yogurts fat-free cookies fat-free cake so people think those are healthy 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 seeds avocado fish the omega-- free 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 stches with a lot of the essential nutrients taken out and also uh too much sugar too much salt too much protein um another thing I I I'd like to mention is that I'm looking at a book now called it all starts with food uh 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 all of a sudden you you need to apply the brakes and they're not working no breaks 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 hard if you like the cookies you're eating you can sit down polish off 5 10 15 cookies no problem uh a big bag of potato chips no problem pretzels no problem uh and the list goes on and on and on the manufacturers have taken the brakes out of those Foods once they remove the brakes meaning the fiber and the other nutrients in those foods that normally fill us we can't stop and we can't satiate ourselves uh for example we can 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 a head of cabbage too easily you can't eat six or seven sweet potatoes too easily because those Foods reum put breaks into those Foods he put ingredients and mechanisms into all the whole foods that prevent you from overindulging and overeating and the rambam says very clearly that the main source of almost all disease is over breeding stuffing the stomach and bad foods that's the combination that the ramb bom sites as being the major primary cause of many health problems that we see today um and in the past as well the ROM even goes as far to say better uh 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 in the eyes of the ramb bom is better than too much of a good food isn't that amazing so 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 breakes that the rebon put into the foods they will fill you they will satiate you um and that's why it's important to try to stick with the right Foods so that makes the I'll tell you now we're 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 uh so if you could do that the r bom says eat until you're about 3/4 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 a friend who told me his father passed away he had a heart attack right after eating a heavy meal 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 uh and the ramom said this 800 years ago and it always true today it's 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 uh is not that great um you know uh the agricultural industry doesn't let the land lay fow every seven years like we do it's interesting to note every seven years the soil gets depleted and by allowing the land to lay fow like the Torah uh 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 uh number of years so we can see U this is a very important principle uh 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 um 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 somewhere as in the midwest one day after that head of spinach is pulled out of the ground it loses 50% of its vitamin C content so what happens to the typical head of spinach it gets pulled out of the ground it goes onto a truck into a warehouse makes its way to the supermarket it sits there for a couple of days you buy that um head of fresh quote fresh spinach sits in your refrigerator for 2 3 Days by the time you eat that head of spinach it could be 2 weeks old and then once it's cut cooked exposed to light Air heating whatever is done to it uh there are 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 100 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 um 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 met mentioned sticking with old Foods trying to do the right thing when it comes to making food choices and so on uh and trying to to build in some of the Mediterranean principles that 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 h brains and so on and so forth you'll see uh the Mediterranean principles uh are very very um sound very balanced and and they work and the results have been there and the studies show that they do get results um 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 to than the fresh because when they pull that head of spinach out and they're going to 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 got Cann um canned are not as good I prefer probably frozen over canned due to the salt and sugar content and even the ingredients in the canning and stuff like that may 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 um but if if it's convenient and and you can and you do that's a good way to get them in so it's probably better than not eating them uh let me just um what I'd like to do we'll leave a few minutes at the end for some questions and comments uh 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 pottassium magnesium and then we have trace minerals micronutrients like selenium iodine copper uh things that we need small 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 in the diet it could affect the cardiovascular system and if you don't get enough uh beta carotene or lutein um it could have affect your eyes you could be more prone to Immaculate degeneration cataracts glucoma and so on and so forth so every nutrient uh will affect the organs in the body in some way if we're not getting an optimal amount of that that nutrient uh many people today are deficient in different nutrients um and that's what I want to talk about right now I want to just uh sort of conclude the talk with what I call core nutrients what 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 going to 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 efficient 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 uh 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 um vitamin D they discovered is really not a vitamin it's a hormone and there are many recepto 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 uh 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 uh an impaired immune system and the list goes on on and on and on many many things that uh vitamin D is very vital for most people are not getting enough this is where we'll take questions in a in a little while this is where um a supplement could play a very valuable role to you okay um I have uh uh um 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 which I know it's a little bit harder to get um 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 which 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 C calcium can come out of the bones and wind up in the soft tissue or in the blood vessels and as age they basically Turn to Stone they suffer from calcification of the blood vessels it's a very common and very problematic uh condition um 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 uh 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 with 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're found in certain fermented soy products there's a famous Japanese food a fermented soy food called NATO I think it's spelled n a t t o um but it it it doesn't go too well with the American palette 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 uh level of Health than 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 the of the Asian or the Japanese diet they they don't their kids don't grow up on the traditional diet drinking four or five or six or whatever glass the milk a day that we're supposed to drink 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 the P many people have osteopenia which is a a precursor to osteoporosis and so on and so forth nevertheless in Japan things like H disease Prost cancer with the prostate breast cancer um and uh bone problems uh 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 uh at the same ages as as we tend to get them so we could see something very interesting happening there um there are certain uh cheeses believe it or not that are cultured in a certain way that they can contain some vitamin K2 one of them that I've heard of recently is something called guda cheese uh I heard also that Brie cheeses may contain vitamin K2 and somebody told me recently that uh Edom Edom cheese is Edam Edam yeah there's another cheese that may contain it but uh I saw some sources for gura um it may have to be researched a little bit more but other than the fermented um I'm sorry the fermented Japanese Foods natto um miso may have a little bit it's another fermented Japanese food product Tempe is another fermented Japanese soy food product that may contain a little bit um and then um it's possible that some of the grass-fed animals may contain some vitamin K2 um and then there are supplements that people can take that can contain vitamin K2 it's something that I included in all my supplements cuz 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 disbiosis we have the the bad or the unfriendly bacteria has gotten the upper hand and the good bacteria is really not in the amounts it should be and when that happens it could affect a lot of uh things in the body uh it could affect immune Health Digestive Health uh and the list goes on and on um so I would say that uh once again this is another area where you might in today's world you may have to rely on a supplement again I'm talking core 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 um but there are there are some good quality probiotic supplements that could fill a gap for you in this area um omega3 another essential nutrient that unless you're eating fish a couple of times a week uh 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 uh there are Omega-3 supplements and the last nutrient I want to talk about very briefly is vitamin B12 um 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 to extract the B12 from the foods that it's in and um 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 can maybe advise you on the amount uh but if it's the dose is high enough over time it can bring your blood levels up of B12 if your B12 is deficient you're low on 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 um I even heard it said once that um a severe deficiency in B12 could create symptoms that look like Alzheimer's um and it might be nothing more than a B12 deficiency but maybe it wasn't checked so that's why um these levels should be checked don't assume that you went to the doctor and they did blood work but everything was checked many times a B12 a vitamin D levels are not checked so you have to ask your doctor to please check those um okay so I would say just to wind up the talk and maybe take some questions or comments you have the the Mediterranean principles for good eating and you have the core supplements that I just mentioned um that would hopefully uh make your nutritional program more comprehensive um I do have some information on the table there we'll take questions first at the end you're welcome to take some of the handouts I have um and you could look at some of the supplements I also have the book there and um let's open up to maybe some questions before I do that I just want to just briefly announce for those that are watching uh for anybody that may want to contact me with a question or a comment and uh they can reach me at 718 544-4036 the email address is RIS and Robert M is and Michael Shields s h i e l DS 62 at verizon.net okay let me uh yeah levels P two3 okay so the for um for for vitamin K two the the I think the the RDA the recommended daily amount I believe is about 80 to 100 micrograms which is not a lot not a lot um I have a multivitamin supplement um called Vitter Shield uh which I have it's been available for about 8 years I've changed the formula three times in the last 8 years to try to keep up with the latest research I currently have 60 micrograms of vitamin K2 also I want to let you know there is different forms of vitamin K2 there something called MK4 and mk7 mk7 is the natural form and it stays in the blood for a longer period of time than the MK4 so that's the one I used in in the supplement that I formulated but I would it's so you're not looking for a lot but the recommended daily amount is is about 80 micrograms um okay and vitamin D um 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 uh how do 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 uh a program to get your D levels up if they're low and then you have to think of a maintenance dose I would say that um 800 to 1,000 IUS 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 test in the one a day that I have uh I do have a th international units of vitamin D3 keep in mind the D3 is better absorb than the D2 so uh that's what you're looking for in a supplement d d uh 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 uh effect someone who didn't have a question or comment yet anybody else yeah go ahead is k1 or K2 potassium or it's not 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 um more the largest amount of mineral in the body is really potassium the requirement is is something like 3500 mg a day whereas calcium is only about 1,000 Mig a day so need a lot more potassium um than than calcium even but it's it's a very important mineral as well for cardiovascular health and and blood pressure regulation and uh and so on okay um any other questions or comments uh Al about the um probiotics yes acidophilus is the one of the most common ones right right um I um the label that's on which is on the bottom it says to take um of them like a few times a day ah like my experience has hecked a lot too much um I whether I do it I used to do it rather was when I got B St because he cares that I take one like mon then found that the choll shab's morning gave you a bad stomach so shab's morning I take one once a week in other words that seems to work so the label label the bottom and the bottle to take so much more okay I understand your point yeah yeah it again when it comes to supplements it's um it it's very tricky to tease out exactly what you're going to need and what's going to work for you sometimes a little stle and error there uh obviously um you know again you 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 ior and the supplements of the tle the I mentioned core supplements because I don't believe in people taking a lot of supplements I I'll just tell you a story in my practice I once had a man I I anytime I counsel anybody I tell him bring in whatever supplement you take me 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 with had 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 spend 20 minutes a day imagine 20 minutes sitting down every day and swallowing pills and then I had to it keep my curiosity I had to see what he was taking so I looked at every bottle and I'll 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 uh a green leaf uh green tea supplement he was taking a garlic supplement he was taking fish oil supplement he was taking inco Boba his doctor also had him on aspir 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 that 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 a lot of nose bleeds lately and uh and he even told me that one time he had such a bad nose bleed he had to go to the hospital and even in the hospital they had trouble stopping it they had to insert a balloon in his nose and blow it up to prevent the the bleeding stop the bleeding so I said to them well that's you know you're overdoing it I would cut back on these uh blood thinners I would let your doctor know what you're taking and I would even get like a clotting you know there's a blood clotting test you can get to see how quickly you blood clots and so on so all I could say is 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 um to really just try to use them in a sensible way to get you know good quality supplements less is better than more sometimes [Music] um that's why I tried to modify or update my formulas based on the research either I I lessen 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 are 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 to a better diet but there are areas that I mentioned probiotics vitamin D K2 uh omega3 and b12 where people could fall short and this is where supplements may help fill an important gap for you so um but you're bringing up a good point um any other comments or questions uh yeah um things working synergistically for bone health like are we still growing bone I thought that no no you are still growing bone every s years you get a brand new skeletal system and the truth is bones are living tissue they're not rocks in the body bones are constantly being the bone cells are dying bones are constantly being worn worn out worn away and the body is constantly regenerating bone tissue in order for you to build healthy bone tissue regardless of what age or a slow bone loss you need there are there are nutritional factors there are exercise factors uh that can help you with with bone health and bone density okay even weightbearing exercises at any age as far as I know will increase bone density because you know when astronauts go up in space they come down they see they've lost bone mask because they're floating there's no gravity there's no force on the skeletal system so we need a certain amount of force uh on the skeletal system uh to help build build you know for better bone density and we need we need the right nutrients to help build healthy bone bone tissue and uh and that's where vitamin D the K2 the Magnesium calcium you know and then there there are many trace minerals and protein and even vitamin C that all play a role in the complicated uh rebuilding of of of bone uh 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 hand so if you want to just uh anybody behind this light back here okay it's in all the foods that most people eat every day unless you're vegetarian it's in fish chicken meat turkey eggs um it's in dairy products but even though you're eating these foods every day you can still be uh 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 keeping mind that um there's a range on B12 it starts maybe down in the lower 200s it may go to 1,000 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 uh I mentioned certain cheeses certain um fermented soy products animal proteins uh meat chicken things like that but because of how animals are raised nowadays and without the right Foods in their diet whether the vitamin K2 is really there uh is questionable the body can sometimes convert uh 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 uh so a supplement may be important the only people uh people that have to be a little bit cautious about vitamin K either K1 or K2 or any kind of K supplement or even K in Foods is people who are on Kuman because uh the vitamin KS do are antagonistic to the drug cumin so if you're taking the drug cumin you have to really be very careful and discuss with your doctor about your food or vitamin intake uh when it comes to the vitamin K vitam also or I'm sorry turmeric the spice yeah what about it that be a factor as far as a c goes because I thing contains cumor right uh no I I turmeric it's that's a different thing um it's I'm talking about the drug kumin you know it's a blood thinning uh drug yeah what about a preg woman what type of vitamin 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 DH DHA um but um you should look into that with your doctor and uh it should be at least a good prenatal with some uh 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 wild I would say when it comes to Wild or farmed wild would be a better choice although they say that even in the farmed I know there are problems uh 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 in farmed uh but I would still be you know I wouldn't go overboard with the farm I would try to use more of the wild uh when you can most of the canned salmon maybe 80% of it is is wild where most of the fresh salmon you buy about 80% of it is farmed so um but you know the main thing is is to get different kinds of fish in and to try to eat more fish tuner is the only one I caution people about in terms of it's being a higher Mercury containing fish so if you switch If instead of eating the tuna you switch to sardines or salmon or macro or Herring or some other kind of fish to replace the tuna those would be me you know probably better choices to avoid the Mercury Alvin give me one cuz I might other okay go ahead just mention the T reason why that at the largest for such as tuna contain much mercury is because because they live the longest they they they get to be they get to be the big they absorb the water FL because they're around so much longer to absorb right and it's a bigger fish right F okay okay let me just um I I just want to see if maybe we can conclude I I want to just conclude on a certain note that I was thinking about today uh this is a little bit uh of a switch in topic uh again I'll be around at the end for the book signing for anybody that might be interested or questions on the supplements there are handouts there there were three handouts there's a call out if you want to contact me uh but I'd like to conclude on a different note uh we're all very aware of the um the terrible tragedies that are taking place in ER TR every day uh I don't know how it couldn't affect everybody in some way uh heart-wrenching uh tragedies and um I recently heard a a from Rabbi D goldwaser and he said that um a lot of times we feel helpless in what we can do but the truth is he said that even a small act or 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 hel you say during the day giving extra sadaka Shir alashan anything you could think of anything you can do don't think it won't make a difference cuz it will said I would try I'm just going to ask that we all contemplate for a little while now before we leave some extra Mitzvah something we could do uh that would be a SPO for our Brethren and erus rooll uh so I'm hoping before we leave we can just all make some uh commitment to something ding with more you pick something that you feel you want to work on or do and I think that would be a good way to conclude this talk uh I want to thank everybody again for coming um I'll be here I'm going to go over to the table over there for anybody that want wants to talk further 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