In Part I of this article series, I discussed ways to increase the amount and quality of bodily sensation in your life by touching and being touched. Here in Part II, I offer some tips on diet to optimize the health of the nerves and optimize nerve transmission. Part III will help you select supplements to augment your improved diet and take your health and vitality to new heights.
During my time as a staff member of the Shake-a-Leg program for spinal cord and brain injured people, I noted that many of the participants ate a goodly amount of junk food. It was distressing to see these folks eat foods so bereft of nutrition that they actually take nutrients out of the body. I was aware that better health and vitality was available to them if they only knew (or cared) to explore healthier nutritional habits.
If you are ambitious about your health, whether wheelchair bound or able bodied, you probably already make the effort to eat less processed and more fresh foods. If you consider physical fitness important, and don’t let your physical challenges get in the way of leading an active outdoor life, optimizing your diet will take you to a new level of well-being.
To Start, A Few Basic Suggestions You may know this already, but if you don’t, you should. There is no way around having a vision of your health goals, being clear in your intention to achieve them, and taking action to implement your goals. This should all come from desire, not making yourself feel like you are in boot camp. Healthy food can be savory, exercise can be enjoyable and satisfying. Be patient with yourself, but also willing to stretch your limits.
Most important is reducing or eliminating foods that rob your body of nutrients. ‘Empty calorie foods’ such as white sugar, alcoholic beverages, soft drinks, products made with white flour, and all manner of candy and processed foods are in this category. These so-called ‘foods’ are so bereft of nutrition that in order to process them, your body has to deplete its own nutritional resources. For example, sugar and soda pop will pull minerals out of your bones. Alcohol is reputed to damage brain cells and other nerve tissues. Is that what you really want?
Eat more fresh, raw foods. Unheated foods contain enzymes, which are needed for every process that takes place in the body, including nerve transmission. Our enzyme potential is limited, because enzymes are destroyed as soon as they are used for various functions in the body, including digestion. Cooked foods contain no enzymes, and require a tremendous output of enzymes from our bodies. If we eat a lot of cooked foods, enzyme potential that could be devoted toward producing metabolic enzymes which heal and repair the body, is instead used up to digest dead foods. By eating a wealth of raw, enzyme-rich foods, we add to our enzyme ‘bank account’ and have a lot more enzymes available for healing and repair.
To enhance the health of your nervous system, add more of the following foods to your diet:
Deep sea cold water fish is the best source of DHA. DHA (an omega 3 essential fatty acid) is essential for proper brain, nervous system, and visual function. The brain is highly dependent on DHA. Helps increase serotonin in brain; maintaining high DHA levels can help prevent dpression, memory loss, and Alzheimer’s disease.
Salmon is one of the best choices. Make sure to buy wild-caught salmon if at all possible. Farm-raised salmon is dosed with antibiotics, the meat artificially colored orange, raised in crowded pens and fed a diet of low-grade chow that salmon were not designed to eat. Wild-caught salmon and other fish are a far better source of omega 3 essential fatty acids and high quality protein than farm-raised.
Wild-caught salmon, walnuts, grassfed beef and dairy, pasture raised fowl. are great sources of omega 3 essential fatty acids. Omega 3’s are an important nutrient for maintaining cell membrane strength and integrity. Most peoples’ diets are far too weighted towards omega 6 essential fatty acids. This has been implicated in cancer and other serious conditions.
Raw aged cheeses like Emmenthaler, Gruyere, and Swiss from Switzerland - contain calcium, magnesium, and the vitamins A and D to help absorb the minerals. Calcium and magnesium are vital to nerve transmission, muscle contraction/ relaxation. Canned salmon and sardines are also good sources of these minerals, since they contain soft, chewable bones.
Dark chocolate is a great source of magnesium. When you buy chocolate, look for the kind with the least sugar (usually the darker chocolate).
Rare steak, uncooked egg yolks (can get in Caeser salad dressing), raw almonds, walnuts, cashews are excellent sources of B-vitamins, which support healthy nerve function.
Egg yolks from naturally-raised chickens (w/o hormones and antibiotics) are one of the best sources of choline and inositol. The brain and nervous system benefits greatly from a diet rich in choline and inositol. Inositol has been shown to impove cognition in Alzheimer’s patients, to help relieve diabetic neuropathy, and to relieve depression and improve mood.
If you have adopted the erroneous belief that fat and cholesterol is bad and should be severely limited in the diet, you may think you should not eat many of the foods I have suggested here. However, after three decades of research, personal experimentation, and coaching many people, I find that people feel better on a diet that includes some of the above foods. Very low-fat diets are dangerous for reasons I don’t have space to go into here. High quality protein and fats are important, especially for the function of the nervous system, and the immune system as well.
I welcome your comments and questions, and you will also find a wealth of information on my blog and website. I wish you the best of health.
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” George Bernard Shaw
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