Blog Week 10 - Foot Health & Your Brain on Keto

I am freshly back from 5 days at the International Brian Injury Association Congress. It was wonderful 5 days with some interesting research and a LOT of great conversations with brilliant and fascinating people.

Some of the most interesting research and conversations I had were around hormones and diet. So this blog will focus on diet- the ketogenic diet. While it has become much of a fad, it has been around for thousands of years, used therapeutically in medicine for over 100 years and is even in the bible (free coffee if you can find me where it is mentioned). 

If you don't want to hear about diet and brain health here is a snippet about walking into your 90s with pep in your step.

Foot health:

Set your feet free.

Try this weeks exercise with your toes daily, try it under your desk, try it standing in line, work those little muscles of your feet. Think up your own creative ways to move your toes. Pick up a marble, pick up a coin. Share with me what you come up with!

Your feet should be strong, you should be able to grasp with them, kick with them and run on them. Weak feet do not need orthotics AKA death casts, they need intrinsic foot muscle work. Want to walk pain free or at least relatively pain free for as long as your live? Having healthy feet will play a key role. Move them, groove them. Our ancestors actually used to walk more that 16,000 steps in their bare feet or slaps of fur. Imagine how strong those feet were. As an athlete strong feet are important as they are the SPRINGS that propel you. They are the SURFACE that helps balance you. Give your feet some love with this weeks video. Also, get a pedicure :)

The Brain and the Ketogenic Diet:

It was a pleasure to listen to Dr Alina Fong and her team present on the use of the ketogenic diet in post concussion patients. This is something I do and other clinicians have done based on knowledge and extrapolating from over 100 years of use in patients with epilepsy as well as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimers disease and more recently traumatic brain injury. The ketogenic diet is a high-fat content diet in which carbohydrates are nearly eliminated so that the body has minimal dietary sources of glucose.

So, this research was driven by clinical practice and low and behold, patients who were following the ketogenic diet had an improvement in migraine type headaches (the outcome of interest). Of course us clinicians knew this all along ;) This diet is not for everyone, for example those with pre-existing cardiac conditions.

I have been off the keto diet for a while but this has fired me up. Just do a pubmed search and you will see many research articles on its Neuroprotective effects. When it comes to the brain, I want mine to be better tomorrow than it was yesterday. The keto diet is a real fad right now but the truth is, it is good for your brain and brains never go out of fashion :)

Do you want to be a better version of yourself tomorrow?? Think about it. What can you adjust to make that possible. Book online and let me help! www.rehablab.ca