close to the bone

Have you ever skimmed through the blogs on this site?

At the top of the page there is a "next blog" key. You press it, it jumps you to the next blog. Some are in a foreign language, some are advertising gimmicks, most are about families. Sometimes, you will run across gut wrenching play-by-play of cancer or infertility. I've read a lot in my life, but never anything so compelling or as raw as these types of posts.

It is amazing what humans can go through.

if I fall in the woods, will it make a sound?

I don't remember ever being this busy. It seems like the dispersing of information is my new job. That sucks, because I would rather be knee deep in spines. No one else is giving out the good stuff though, I'm really not sure why. I don't think I know everything (ish), there must be some other doctors out there who have something to offer. Where are they?

Whatever.

Make sure you check out our kick-ass newsletter for May, pretty fun stuff. Add us to your friends list on face book, we update all the time. Fink Chiropractic Center.

Habit #4 -- Teach your kids to wash their hands.

I come from a large family, 5 boys and a girl. My parents worked hard to keep us in line and presentable. You can’t keep 5 boys out of the dirt for long. I fondly remember my dad carting in 100 pound bags of sand for our sandbox. Most of that sand went into the yard, into hair, eyes, mouths, and other areas. You can imagine how easy it would have been for the nefarious bugs and viruses we exposed ourselves to; to make a run at our immune systems. Oddly, I don’t remember ever being sick as a kid. Part of the reason I now realize, the near religious zeal with which my mother embraced hand washing. Teaching your children to wash their hands regularly is the simplest way to avoid infection and reduce colds and flu. This really works. Make it a non-issue by taking the time to wash your own hands. When to wash, you ask?

- Before preparing food, setting the table, or serving food.
-Before eating meals or snacks.
- After visiting a bathroom.
- After blowing their nose.
- After handling money.
- After playing with a pet.

Just like with developing the reading habit, when you teach your kids to wash regularly you are imparting a skill. Imparting skills is a good thing. Skills give power and ability. Power and ability breed confidence, and confidence is everything for young people.

I can haz reedin?

Continuing my 'Healthy Habits' rant, let's cover number 3.

Habit #3 -- Teach your kids to read. If they aren’t old enough to read, read to them.

Study after study demonstrates how kids who learn to read at a younger age place higher in standardized testing. Also, consider that there are almost 50 million Americans with poor literacy skills in this country. It isn’t because they aren’t intelligent. It is because literacy skills develop alongside cognition and visual skills. Simply put, reading to your kids, and encouraging your kids to read puts them ahead and gives them a great habit that will benefit them their entire lives. Giving them a head start on a skill as important as reading is a powerful gift. The sooner they read, the sooner they can start interacting with the world on their terms. It’s a big deal.

One side note, don't read 'There's is an Alligator Under My Bed' to a 2 year-old.

It's just not going to work out the way you want.

some dudes

This is what my patient list looks like at 5 today. Adjusting them is easy, catching them is not.

Eat it up.

Last post, I covered the first habit that I know kids need to have to be healthy. This post, I want to cover the second most important thing we can teach our children.

Healthy Habit # 2 - Teach your kids how to eat healthy.

Nutrition, the discussion of it, and the business of it, are a big (pun intended) topic in this country. Multiples of a billion dollars are spent on diets, supplements, and the like. Given that we spend so much more on these types of foods and ingredients, we should be one of the thinnest nations around right? As it turns out we are one of the fattest and sickest in the world.
How can it be that so much money is spent and so many people remain overweight? The answer is simple. People do not know what to eat, and they do not know what to feed their kids.
I’m going to tell you exactly what to do in order to make sure your kids develop some healthy eating habits. Ready?

1) Eat real food.
2) Do not eat food that isn’t real.
3) Eat more often
4) Eat less

Real food. Food that isn’t made in a factory. It comes from the ground, grows on trees, etc. Food made in factories = not real food. Stay away from it. I don’t care what the wrapper says. Teach your kids to enjoy real food and you give them an incredible edge against obesity and general health.

By eating every few hours, rather than engorging ourselves on 2-3 meals per day, we spread out our caloric loading. This allows our metabolism to burn throughout the day, rather than loading it down. Also, when we eat more often, we eat less per meal. This helps to prevent binging, increases metabolic rate, and lessens the impact a nutritionally weak (pound cake) meal will have on our bodies.

Is this convenient? No. Can it be done? Yes. Health isn’t convenient, and it’s rarely fun. You know what else isn’t fun? Kids trudging along a lifetime of sugar and processed food induced heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and depression. That isn’t fun either. I’m not being apocalyptic, the numbers don’t lie.

In unrelated news :

Fink Chiropractic Center: We give away trophies.

Big Jack ain't happy.

play date

I like talking.

More importantly, I like talking about health and healthy kids. The problem is that the two are incompatible. You cannot have a discussion about healthy kids with kids in the room. Well, you can, but it isn't very productive.

I haz a solution! Find a big playground and set the kids loose, then spend some time talking about how to raise healthy kids!

Fink Chiropractic Center Playdate.

27 families, 13 pizzas, 50 bottles of water, zero fatalities! Enjoy the pictures!

do what I say

Going to step away from complaining about the problems I see with the pseudo science of some aspects of modern medicine. I could point out the article in this month's issue of the AMA discussing how the two most common back surgical procedures are a joke and unproven. I could point out how the black label, or off label prescribing of drugs has malpracted a generation of women.

But no, its the high road today for me.

Today and my next few posts I want to talk about kids. I wrote a presentation detailing what I feel are the 7 most important habits we can help them develop. I have a bit of experience observing and being involved in pediatric care. To date, we have over 45,000 pediatric adjustments at the office.

45000.

We have had a chance to partake in a lot of life changing therapies and strategies. I'm going to include some of those discussions here.

Sadly, today's children are among the most under exercised and overweight youths in the nation's history. One in five American youths ages 12 to 17 is overweight, according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. NHANES is the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, which is a part of our friends, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

Furthermore, two thirds of our children can't pass a basic physical fitness test. Forty percent of boys and 70 percent of girls ages 6 to 17 can't do more than one pull-up. Half the girls and 30 percent of boys can't run a mile in under 10 minutes. In addition, 40 percent show early signs of heart and circulation problems, according to a recent report by the President’s Council on Fitness and Sports.

Habit #1

Move. Just move. Teach your kids to jump, run, play, throw, anything to get them out and moving. This habit alone dominates the rest of the list. Sedentary lifestyle is murdering our kids, slowly but surely.

The human body is made to move. It is through motion, and only through motion, that the brain gains information it needs to make critical decisions about staying healthy. I’m not going to go into details because you don’t care about them. What you need to know is this, if you don’t teach your children to play hard, often, then you aren’t giving them the tools they need to succeed. If they see motion as an option, and not as a basic health sustaining activity, then you didn’t do your job. In every review I did, obesity and sedentary lifestyle played a factor in the lives of sick kids.

How do you teach your kids to move? You move. Get out there and do something. Don’t like sports? Hike. Don’t like to hike? Cycle. Don’t like to cycle? Plant a garden or pick up trash. Hate trees, cycling, biking, sports, and hiking? Get a rope, get a flashlight and go mediate in a cave on what you can do. Bottom line is this, suck it up and take your kids out to do something. Repeat this several times per week.

Habit 2 soon.