Author Archives: Dr. Peter Knight

Achoo! Its Spring Allergy Season

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Do you start sneezing every year when the trees begin to bloom?   Are you one of the thousands of people living in Southern Maine who suffer with seasonal allergies?

Seasonal allergies are a common occurrence with between 15 and 20 percent of the population experiencing some level of symptoms. Common symptoms of seasonal allergies include:

·        Sneezing

·        Runny Nose

·        Itchy nose, eyes, and/or throat

·        Fatigue

·        Headaches

·        Sinus congestions

·        Stuffy nose

  • Hives/ skin rashes

These symptoms occur when the body mistakes pollen for a foreign invader and launches an immune attack against it. Conventional treatment consists of using antihistamines, decongestants, nasal steroids, and allergy shots.  While these methods may be successful for some, they are not always effective and are not without side effects.

One theory behind why some people are affected more by seasonal allergies than others has to do with the total load on the immune system.  Think of your immune system as a kettle.  As the kettle fills up with more and more burdens it will eventually overflow and that is when you become symptomatic.

Unless you want to move or live in a bubble, there is little that can be done to avoid the exposure to pollen during the spring, summer, and fall.  However, many of the things that fill up our kettles are modifiable.  When we identify them and reduce their additive effect on the total load it can help to take some of the burden off the body and decrease your reactivity.

Dr. Knight’s approach to seasonal allergies includes identifying and modifying stressors on the immune system that we can control in order to decrease your sensitivity to seasonal pollens.  In addition, he recommends natural substances that can help reduce the allergic response and provide relief while you work on more sustainable long-term relief.

If you are tired of reaching for the tissue box, schedule an appointment with Dr. Knight and begin to enjoy spring in Maine without a stuffy nose.

Posted in General Health

The 4-7-8 Relaxing Breath Exercise

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This exercise is utterly simple, takes almost no time, requires no equipment and can be done anywhere. Although you can do the exercise in any position, sit with your back straight while learning the exercise. Place the tip of your tongue against the ridge of tissue just behind your upper front teeth, and keep it there through the entire exercise. You will be exhaling through your mouth around your tongue; try pursing your lips slightly if this seems awkward.

  • Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whoosh sound.
  • Close your mouth and inhale quietly through your nose to a mental count of four.
  • Hold your breath for a count of seven.
  • Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whoosh sound to a count of eight.
  • This is one breath. Now inhale again and repeat the cycle three more times for a total of four breaths.

Note that you always inhale quietly through your nose and exhale audibly through your mouth. The tip of your tongue stays in position the whole time. Exhalation takes twice as long as inhalation. The absolute time you spend on each phase is not important; the ratio of 4:7:8 is important. If you have trouble holding your breath, speed the exercise up but keep to the ratio of 4:7:8 for the three phases. With practice you can slow it all down and get used to inhaling and exhaling more and more deeply.

This exercise is a natural tranquilizer for the nervous system. Unlike tranquilizing drugs, which are often effective when you first take them but then lose their power over time, this exercise is subtle when you first try it but gains in power with repetition and practice. Do it at least twice a day. You cannot do it too frequently. Do not do more than four breaths at one time for the first month of practice. Later, if you wish, you can extend it to eight breaths. If you feel a little lightheaded when you first breathe this way, do not be concerned; it will pass.

Once you develop this technique by practicing it every day, it will be a very useful tool that you will always have with you. Use it whenever anything upsetting happens – before you react. Use it whenever you are aware of internal tension. Use it to help you fall asleep.

Posted in Stress Reduction

An Apple a Day…

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Ever wondered if there is any truth in that old saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”?

Apples from L to R: Grimes Golden, Baldwin, Black Oxford, and Esopus Spitzenburg

Turns out, there is!

In 2015 The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study looking to see if apple consumption was associated with fewer doctor’s visits.  While the study did not find a decrease in doctor’s visits in those who reported that they regularly consumed apples, it did find a significant decrease in prescription medication use in apple consumers.

While apple consumption may not be a panacea, it can be a delicious way to improve your health.  Consuming apples can  be beneficial for lowering cholesterol, decreasing inflammation, promoting weight loss, optimizing digestive function, protecting against lung and colon cancer, diversifying the microbiome and lowering asthma risk.

The health benefits of apples are thought to be due to the presence a high number of antioxidant compounds along with the fiber and pectin content.  Many of the antioxidant compounds in apples are found in highest concentrations in the skins, so for greatest benefit, do not peel them.

According to the Environmental Working Group, apples are among the 12 foods with the highest pesticide residues on them. Because of this, organic or minimally treated apples are best for individuals wanting to avoid pesticide associated health risks.  The skin contains the highest concentration of pesticide residue, so if left with no other option, peel nonorganic varieties.

There are many ways to enjoy apples, from eating them fresh off the tree, to making apple sauce, and apple pie.  Below is a recipe for a wheat free Caramelized Apple Pancake. Enjoy!

Caramelized Apple Pancake

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup plain soy, rice, or cow milk
  • 1 large egg lightly beaten
  • 3 Tbsp. grape seed, coconut, or canola oil
  • 1 cup oat flour
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • 3 Tbsp. maple syrup
  • 2 large apples, cored and cut into ¼ inch thick slices
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • Zest of ½ a lemon and a splash of lemon juice
  • ½ cup walnuts chopped.

Preheat oven to 500.  In a medium bowl, combine milk, egg, 1 tbsp. maple syrup, and 1 tbsp. oil.  Add in flour, baking soda, and salt.  Stir until combined.  Heat a cast iron or other oven proof skillet over medium high heat. Add 1 tbsp. oil.  Put apples in pan in single layer.  Allow to cook 4 minutes or until they begin to brown. Carefully flip apples and continue to cook until browned on second side.  Add 2 Tbsp. maple syrup, cinnamon, and walnuts.  Toss to just coat apples. Remove from heat. Using a pastry brush or piece of paper towel, coat sides of pan with oil.  Pour in batter.  Put in oven on middle rack. Reduce oven to 425 and cook for 12 minutes or until top is beginning to brown and the pancake is cooked. Slice into wedges and serve.

Davis MA, Bynum JP, Sirovich BE. Association between apple consumption and physician visits: appealing the conventional wisdom that an apple a day keeps the doctor away. JAMA Intern Med. 2015;175(5):777-783.

Posted in General Health, Recipes

Can You Trust Your Supplements?

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images35DGQ9E6If you are like more than 50% of Americans you took one or more dietary supplements today. The use of dietary supplements has been increasing over the past 20 years. What you once could only find in health food stores is now available in drug stores and grocery stores. It has even become common for conventionally trained medical doctors to recommend multivitamins, fish oil, probiotics and vitamin D. Most of the patients that I work with are taking multiple supplements before I start working with them.

While I recommend dietary supplements to many of my patients I do have concerns about the safety, interactions, and quality of dietary supplements. I will be addressing safety and interactions in future blogs, but in this blog I want to focus on quality issues with dietary supplements.

A quality evaluation by the company Consumer Labs found that 20% of the vitamin D products that they tested failed their quality testing. Two products contained almost twice as much vitamin D as was listed on the label, once product contained unacceptable levels of lead, and two products did not disintegrate within the expected 30 minutes.  A popular national grocery store chains  calcium with  vitamin D product  contained 175% of the amount of vitamin D on the label and still had not disintegrated after an hour. So while you might save a little money on buying the grocery store brand  calcium and vitamin D  if it doesn’t break down in your digestive tract you might as well be throwing your money away.

In another evaluation Consumer Labs found that 16 of 42 multivitamins tested either had less of a nutrient or nutrients than the label stated, had more of a nutrient or nutrient than the label stated, or didn’t dissolve under normal circumstances. While the benefits of taking a multivitamin can be debated, if you are taking a multivitamin it would be good to know that it contains the amounts listed on the label and also that it is going to dissolve in your stomach as opposed to in the sewer.

Several years ago an analysis of Ayurvedic herbal products purchased from health food stores in the Boston area found that over 20% of them contained dangerous levels of lead, mercury, and arsenic. While the amounts in a single pill were not enough to cause a problem, if you were taking them every day for months, the toxic exposure could begin to have serious health consequences.

A study done at my alma mater Bastyr University looking at the quality of probiotic supplements found that only one product out of twenty contained exactly what the label claimed it to contain.  30% of the products were contaminated with other organisms not listed on the label and 20% had no growth of any bacteria.

These examples unfortunately are just the tip of the iceberg. Other issues have included adulteration with anabolic steroids, high levels of toxic solvent residues, failure to contain the herb  species listed on the label, and inclusion of rancid oils.

While I have a great appreciation for dietary supplements, it has become clear to me that there is a great deal of variability in the quality of products sold as dietary supplements in the United States. While there has been an increased effort by the FDA to enforce basic quality standards, the supplement industry remains largely under regulated. The FDA does now require supplement companies to follow specific good manufacturing practices (GMP) in regards to the manufacturing of the product, but there is not the infrastructure to adequately enforce these and even if they did there is concern that the FDA standards may not be adequate enough to ensure that supplements are safe, free of contaminants and contain the substances that the label says that they do. The GMPs also don’t regulate the effectiveness of the product, the forms of the ingredients, where the herbs and nutraceuticals come from, or whether or not the additives or fillers used might have negative effects.

Fortunately there are some companies that have taken it upon themselves to make sure that they are producing high quality products. These companies not only follow the FDA regulations, they go beyond these standards to ensure that when you buy one of their products it contains the ingredients they say they do, in the amounts listed on the label and have been tested to make sure that they do not contain heavy metals, rancid oils, microbes, pesticide residues, solvents, or pharmaceutical drugs.

Buying dietary supplements through large online retailers can seem like a convenient and cost saving method.  Unfortunately there have been numerous recent  reports of counterfeit supplements being sold on Amazon including fake products made to look like products by the popular supplement companies NOW and Host Defense.

To make sure that my patients have access to high quality dietary supplements that they can trust I have partnered with the online dispensary Fullscript.  Fullscript carries supplements by companies that adhere to the highest quality standards and makes sure that the products products that have been meticulously selected and monitored, stored, and shipped with care.  For more information about Fullscript’s quality practices, click here.

If you have not yet signed up with Fullscript, click here to get started.

So the next time you are tempted to buy that cheap bottle of vitamins remember that you may be getting more (or far less) than you paid for!

Posted in Dietary Supplements, General Health

The Garden Within

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“The successful gardener has always known you don’t need to master the science of soil in order to nourish it. You just need to know what it likes to eat- basically organic matter- and how, in general, to align your interests with the interests of the microbes and the plants.  The gardener also discovers that, when pathogens or pests appear, chemical interventions “work”, that is, solve the immediate problem, but at a cost to the long-term health of the soil ad the whole garden.”  -Michael Pollan The New York Times May 19th, 2013

While this quote may seem like it is from an article about organic gardening, it is from an article entitled “Some of My Best Friends are Bacteria” in which author Michae Pollan compares the microflora of our gastrointestinal tract with the soil microbes of a garden.

As an avid gardener and as a naturopathic doctor with a strong interest in gastrointestinal health, this comparison is one that I frequently think about while I have been tending my garden beds this summer.

In gardening we learn that if we nourish and build good soil the plants will grow well, and we will have a good harvest year after year. Plants tend to be resilient to diseases, and pests are often controlled by the beneficial insects that are attracted to a healthy diverse garden. In industrial agriculture (as well as in many backyard gardens), the focus is on getting the plants to grow as quickly, uniformly, and in as high of a volume as possible.  The soil is depleted and does not contain the diversity of soil nutrients and microbes and so high levels of synthetic fertilizers must be given to the plants.  The plants are susceptible to many diseases and pests and so they have to be treated (or genetically modified) in order to survive.  This practice needs a high level of input, produces food deplete in nutrients and is not sustainable.

Our gastrointestinal tracts can be thought of in a similar way to the soil of the garden.  The trillions of bacteria that inhabit our intestines play an integral role in promoting the health of their host (us).  If we create an optimal environment for them to grown in, provide them with the nutrients that they need to survive, and ensure that we are growing a diverse population we will be rewarded with vitamins, decreased inflammation, optimal weight management, balanced immune function, and production of calming neurotransmitters to name but a few of the benefits. 

If we create a less hospitable environment by starving them of the nutrients they need, killing them off with antibiotics from varied sources, and live our lives in such a sterile way that we don’t allow for diversity in our gut microflora, we may end up with many negative health consequences including increased inflammation, obesity, diabetes, allergies, gastrointestinal illnesses and autoimmune diseases to name but a few.

Our knowledge of the importance and influence of our gut microflora is in its relative infancy.  While there is a great deal of research being done to learn more, we do not know enough to always have certainty as to what bacteria are “good”, what bacteria are “bad”, and what the effects of differences in the diversity of the bacteria may have on our health.

We do know enough to know that it is important to nurture and foster our garden within.  While it can be changed by external influences, the microbial community is relatively stabilized by the time we are three years old.  Exposure to bacteria through vaginal birth and breast feeding seems to have the major influence on how this community develops.  While we can’t go back and change what occurred before we were three, there are steps that you can take to “help your garden grow.

  • “Eat food, mostly plants, not too much”.  While this quote is from an earlier Pollan work, In Defense of Food, its wisdom holds true for creating a healthy microflora population as well.  The fibers and other polysaccharides in plant foods serve as the prime food supply for our bacteria.  The parts of the plant foods that we can’t digest, our gut microbiome can.  People consuming a diet high in plant foods and lower in animal foods seem to have a greater biodiversity of gut bacteria.
  • Limit intake of processed foods. Processed foods tend to be void of the polysaccharides and fibers that feed our gut bacteria.  Foods high in refined carbohydrates and sugars seem to feed less beneficial species of bacteria as well as encouraging the overgrowth of yeast species.  Processed foods can also contain chemical compounds that can inhibit the growth of our gut bacteria and create a less hospitable environment for them to grow in.
  • Eat more fermented foods.  Naturally fermented foods such as sauerkraut, kim chi, yogurt, kefir, and kombucha contain beneficial bacterial species that can help colonize the intestines and promote the growth of the good bacteria already present.
  • Eat foods high in prebiotics that help to feed your gut bacteria including garlic, onions, leeks, Jerusalem artichokes, dandelion greens, asparagus, bananas, legumes, oats, and avocados.
  • Don’t eat on the run or when you are under stress.  Eating quickly or when you are stressed can decrease your ability to digest your food and can lead to overgrowth of potentially problematic gut bacteria.
  • Engage in stress reducing activities such as meditation, yoga, journaling, walking or exercise.  High levels of stress hormones can decrease the population of beneficial gut bacteria.
  • Consider taking prebiotic and probiotic supplements.  Prebiotic supplements can help to feed and diversify your microbiome. Probiotic supplements can help to modify the environment in your gastrointestinal tract to help to encourage the growth of a healthy microbiome.  You can find my recommendations for prebiotic and probiotic supplements for general health at Fullscript.
  • Go slow when introducing prebiotic foods and supplements.  Consuming large amounts of prebiotics can cause an increase in intestinal gas production.  To prevent this from happening, it is best to start with a small amount and gradually increase it.

If you would like to know more about the ecology of your gastrointestinal tract, there are stool tests that can identify the bacteria, yeasts, and parasites present.  Based on the results of these tests I can make more specific recommendation on how to optimize your “garden within.” 

For more information or to schedule an appointment call (207 805-1129) or email my office.

Posted in Gastrointestinal Health, General Health, Gut Microbiota, Uncategorized

Summer Recipes from the Omnivore’s Delight Archive

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Strawberry Salsa

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups diced strawberries
  • ½ jalapeño pepper
  • 1/4 of a medium white onion, finely minced
  • ½ cup cilantro, chopped
  • Juice of ½ a lime
  • ½ tsp salt.

Remove seeds and ribs from pepper. Mince into small pieces. 

Combine berries, pepper, onion, and cilantro in a small bowl.  Pour lime juice over the top and sprinkle with salt.  Mix to combine.  Serve with chips, or try on grilled chicken or salmon.

Jicama Mango Salad

Ingredients:

  • 1 medium jicama, peeled and chopped into ¼ inch cubes
  • 1 small white onion chopped
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 medium mango peeled and cut into ¼ inch cubes  (Can use frozen mango)
  • ¼ tsp freshly ground pepper
  • 2tbsp lime juice
  • 2 tbsp lemon juice
  • 2 tbsp chopped cilantro leaves

In a colander, toss jicama and onion with salt.  Allow to sit for 15 minutes. Rinse and put in a large bowl.  Add mango, lime juice, lemon juice, cilantro, and pepper.  Toss to combine, adjust seasoning to taste.  Serve immediately, or refrigerate until serving.

Sesame Garlic Snap Pea Salad

Ingredients:

  • 1 pound fresh sugar snap peas
  • 3 Tbsp toasted sesame oil
  • 1 Tbsp seasoned rice wine vinegar
  • 1 tsp red pepper flakes
  • 1 clove garlic smashed and chopped
  • ½ tsp salt
  • 1 Tbsp sesame seeds

Put the snap peas in a medium bowl.  In a small bowl, whisk together the sesame oil, rice vinegar, pepper flakes, garlic, and salt.  Pour dressing over the snap peas and toss to coat well. Sprinkle on sesame seeds and toss again to distribute them.  Refrigerate for at least 15 minutes before serving.

Posted in Recipes

Are Dietary Supplements Sending People To The Emergency Room?

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emergencyI routinely recommend the use of dietary supplements as part of my treatment plans with my patients.  Because of this my ears perked up when I heard a story on NPR a couple of weeks ago about the high number of people ending up in the ER due to adverse events related to dietary supplements. The story was about a study in the New England Journal of Medicine published on October 15th that found that an estimated 23000 emergency room visits each year were attributed to dietary supplements.

Now I am of the belief that it would be ideal to prevent any visit to the emergency room and so I was curious to look into the details of the study a little bit further.  23,000 sounds like a large number, but when you take into account that there are 136 million ER visits each year, this ends up being a very small percentage of total ER visits- .019% to be exact. To put this into perspective, 731,000 ER visits were associated with adverse events to the medical use of prescription drugs, 775,000 pediatric visits were for injuries associated with organized sports, 1.2 million visits were due to alcohol ingestion as the primary cause, and over 76,000 were for fire arm related injuries.

According to 2011 data 166 million Americans use dietary supplement and so there is only a .015% chance that someone taking a dietary supplement is going to end up in the ER because of an adverse event.   As I said, I feel that any preventable ER visit is too many, but taking dietary supplements seems like a relatively low risk behavior and not worthy of devoting the media attention to it that it has received.

Looking at the study even more closely, 20% of the visits were due to accidental ingestion by children under the age of 4. While this is a serious issue, it has nothing to do with the supplements themselves but instead has more to do with the childproofing of the home.  Of the close to 3000 visits that were attributed to those over the age of 65, over 60% were because of swallowing issues. Again this is a serious issue, but has less to do about the safety of the dietary supplements themselves.

This is not to say that there were no actual adverse events associated with supplements use. The products responsible for 42% of the total ER visits were supplements marketed for energy and weight loss. Many of these products contain stimulants and ingredients that are not really dietary supplements but instead should be classified as undeclared active pharmaceutical ingredients. While I agree that many of these supplements pose potential harm and should be taken off the market, the actual risk is still relatively low.

Posted in Dietary Supplements

Just a Spoonful of Honey…

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Camp 2013 025Last year, my wife and I began our latest hobby, beekeeping. Over the course of the summer our hives built up from fledgling colonies to robust pollinating and nectar collecting forces.  Despite getting our fair share of stings, by August we managed to harvest over 50 pounds of honey. This amount is staggering when you consider that it takes 12 bees their entire lives to produce 1 tsp of honey and that on average bees have to visit 2 million flowers to produce 1 pound of honey.  While 50 pounds sound like a lot, if all goes well, we may end up with four times that amount this year.   We have enjoyed eating and sharing our honey over the past nine months and have been constantly looking for new ways to use it in cooking.  While I think that honey is delicious, as a doctor I have been intrigued by the myriad of benefits it can have on our health as well.

While the rise in the interest in bees and beekeeping is a relatively new phenomenon, the use of honey as medicine is not. The Egyptians were using honey as medicine more than 4000 years ago and would put some in their burial chambers to take into the afterworld.  As a testament to its antimicrobial and antioxidant properties, samples of honey found in Egyptian tombs have been found to be perfectly preserved and still edible.

CSC_0125One of the prime ways that the Egyptians used honey was for dressing wounds.  Honey is still used for wound healing today and studies have backed up its effectiveness.  Honey acts a perfect wound dressing since it cleans the wound, acts as an antimicrobial, stimulates tissue regeneration and reduces inflammation.  Honey has been found to be useful in in a wide range of wounds including abrasions abscesses, bed sores, ulcers, surgical wounds, and burns.

In a time when pharmaceutical antimicrobials are becoming less effective against bacterial infections, honey has shown promise as antimicrobial agent inhibiting the growth of over 60 species of bacteria including MRSA. Unlike conventional antibiotics it does not appear that honey leads to the development of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria.  Honey also does not seem to negatively affect our beneficial gut microbes and has even been shown to increase levels of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria.

Honey has other benefits for the gastrointestinal tract in addition to its impact on the microbiota.  Honey has been shown to speed the healing of gastric and duodenal ulcers and also to decrease inflammation of the stomach known as gastritis.  Use of diluted honey has been found to speed the recovery from cases of infectious diarrhea and gastroenteritis.  Taking a teaspoon of honey before meals has been found to decrease the incidence of heart burn or gastro esophageal reflux.

While the idea of pouring honey in your eye may sound strange, eye drops made from hone have been found to be helpful for various ophthalmological conditions including conjunctivitis, blepharitis, dry eyes, keratitis, corneal injuries and even chemical burns.

I typically recommend patients with increased cardiovascular risk and elevated cholesterol avoid sugar, but honey intake may actually decrease cardiovascular risk.  When natural honey was compared with artificial honey made of fructose and glucose, the natural honey was found to lower total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, triglycerides, and CRP, a marker for inflammation.  In addition it caused a slight increase in the more beneficial HDL cholesterol.    Honey was also found to lower blood pressure and its high antioxidant content may further reduce cardiovascular disease risk.

Coughs in children can lead to sleepless nights for both the child and their parents.  A double blind placebo controlled study reported in the journal Pediatrics in 2012 may help give relief to children and their parents.   Children with night time coughs caused by an upper respiratory infection given a spoonful of honey before bed decreased coughing and improved sleep.  Just keep in mind not to use this remedy in children under 1 year of age as there is a small risk of botulism.

In addition to the properties that I have mentioned that have been studied, numerous anecdotal claims about honey’s healing properties exist.  One of the ones that I hear most frequently is the use of local honey to reduce the severity of seasonal allergies.  While studies looking at this effect have not been conclusive, my own experience has shown it to be beneficial.  When using honey for this use it is important for the honey to be as local as possible so that you are getting exposed to the pollens in your area.

a-jar-of-honeyWhen buying honey it is important to know that all honey is not the same and that much of what is sold as honey is actually not honey.  A study from 2011 found that 75% of what is sold as honey has actually had the pollen filtered out of it.  The removal of the pollen appears to decrease the beneficial properties of the honey and definitely decreases it effect on seasonal allergies.  When buying honey it is important to remember that you get what you pay for.  It was also found that inexpensive “honey” from China was actually honey diluted with high fructose corn syrup.

When you buy honey it is best to buy raw honey and the honey should say on it where it was collected.  If you are not able to find local raw honey in your grocery store, try looking at health food stores, farmers markets, or even stores devoted to the sale of honey, bee products and beekeeping supplies like Portland’s The Honey Exchange.  Owners Phil and Megan Gavin have a wide selection of local and non-local raw honeys and can tell you about where the honey comes from, what it tastes like and always have a number of delicious honeys available for sample.  You can also look inside their observation hive and see the bees in action.

For a refreshing thirst quenching summer time treat try this recipe for a honey rhubarb drink from Poland that combines that tang of rhubarb with the sweet floral taste of honey.

Posted in General Health

Polish Honey Rhubarb Drink

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Adapted from a recipe by Barbara Rolekrhubarb cocktails

  • 4 cups water
  • 1/2 cup honey
  • 1 pound rhubarb, peeled if necessary, chopped
  • 3 cups hot water
  • Orange slice or mint for garnish

 

Bring 4 cups water to boil, remove from heat, stir in honey and let cool.

Whiz chopped rhubarb in a food processor. Place pulp in medium bowl, pour hot water over pulp and cover. When bowl is cool enough to handle, place in refrigerator for 2 hours or until cold.

Once cold, strain rhubarb pulp through a sieve into honey-water mixture. Stir. Pour over ice and garnish with either an orange slice or a mint leaf.

Posted in Recipes

Find the foods that are healthy for you.

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4fFood sensitivities are a common occurrence affecting more than 35% of the population Food sensitivities can cause a wide range of symptoms including:

  • Weight gain
  • Heartburn
  • Constipation
  • Diarrhea
  • Low energy
  • Lack of focus
  • Irritability
  • Depression
  • Chronic congestion
  • Skin rashes
  • Poor sleep
  • Muscle aches
  • Joint pain

 

Unlike food allergies which cause immediate onset of symptoms, symptoms of food sensitivities can be delayed by hours or even days. The wide variety of symptoms and the delay in symptoms presentation can make it very hard to make a connection between the food and the reaction. Because of this, many people who suffer symptoms caused by food sensitivities don’t realize that a food is to blame.

Uncovering hidden food sensitivities can often be a difficult task. Lab tests used to test for food sensitivities can be costly and often unreliable. Elimination and challenge diets are the gold standard for diagnosing foods sensitivities, but they can often be hard to follow and if done incorrectly can be hard to interpret.

To help you to determine if any of your symptoms are being caused by adverse reactions to foods, I am offering a four week elimination diet class beginning on Tuesday April 29th. This class will help you to successfully undertake a comprehensive elimination diet, determine which foods are causing your symptoms, and learn how to potentially decrease your food reactions and prevent new ones from developing.

The four week group program cost $195 and includes:

  1. Elimination Diet Program Binder with the detailed, instructions, recipes, tips, resources and tracking tools needed to be successful with the program.
  2. Access to an Online Group for participants only, moderated by Dr. Knight.
  3. Four Group Sessions held on Tuesday evenings at my office at 222 Saint John Street in Portland from 6:30 to 8pm:
  • April 29th: Getting Started
  • May 6th: Strategies for Successful Elimination
  • May 13th: How to challenge.
  • May 20th: Discoveries and life beyond the program.

To register or for more information call (207) 805-1129 or email [email protected]

Posted in class/event, food sensitivities
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