It’s no secret I am in the midst of some serious deep-diving through the micronutrient evidence base & at a depth of about 30 metres I struck Boron! Don’t yawn! I saw that. Thinking, ‘boring’, when we hear, ‘Boron’, is almost as bankable as watching everyone reach for their water bottles when you mention anything hydration-related 🤣 But I am here to restore your positive regard for this mineral and remediate its bad (& boring) rep! In preparation for the Nutrient Prescriber’s Program we started each nutrient review with the seminal contemporary nutritional texts and then launched ourselves headlong into the latest & greatest research. By the end of all the Boron bits in all my trusty texts the yawn was not gorn! But the moment I started reading the research I was like, ‘Are we even talking about the same thing?!’Turns out we’re not 😵🤦♀️
You see Boron has been a longstanding victim of identity theft. What we’ve been lead to believe is Boron is weed-killer and ant-poison and look it does give us some of the benefits of Boron but not all. And it possess a pharmacokinetic & toxicity profile that naturally occurring Boron simply does not.
Who decided that the Boron that is ubiquitous in our environment but almost exclusively consumed by us only after biotransformation by plants – could just skip that last bit and still be safe and optimally beneficial?! Probably the same guy that came up with folic acid, may I suggest? Anyway, enough is enough. We all need to relearn Boron – naturally occurring Boron – in the form of Sugar Borate Esters (SBE)- the evidence of benefits for which will blow all of our little minds! Well it certainly blew mine! Looks like this natural form of Boron is going to hit the Australian market in the not-too-distant-future 🐦 can’t wait to see which supplier is sufficiently progressive and research-aware that they bring this to market, having been available as a high grade supplement, employed in numerous RCTS OS for some time. But this little Update in Under 30 is not waiting around for that release date – there is much to be gained from SBEs right now – so make some noise as the real Boron at last takes the stage!🎤
Boron has been the victim of longstanding identity theft and we unknowingly have been interacting with its imposter. Contrary to everything you’ve ever been told about this mineral, naturally occurring Boron is full to overflowing with benefits for our gut, our bones, our brain, our management of other minerals and is safe in large quantities. That ‘bad guy Boron’ you were introduced to and is still present in many of your supplements is a form we never consume in food…and therein lies a world of difference! Come meet the real Boron so you and your patients can get the real benefits!
You can purchase The Boron Deception: How We’ve Been Fooledhere. If you are an Update in Under 30 Subscriber, you will find it waiting for you in youronline account.You can become an Update in Under 30 Subscriber to access this episode and the entire library of Update in Under 30 audios and resources here.
Any steps towards inclusivity in societal & cultural terms are cause for celebration but in medicine, that can come in the form of a ‘diagnosis of inclusion’, the opposite, of course, of a ‘diagnosis of exclusion’ and potentially as slippery and loose as it sounds. That’s the somewhat precarious position we find ourselves presently in with perimenopause and menopause. With greater recognition of just how long health effects can kick in before there are any cycle changes [2-12 years for those of you playing along at home] and the widening lens now taking in the diversity of such health effects, women’s health has had a win. But, I would argue, this is not without a double edge. After all, aren’t we, as a result, more at risk, as women, of having everything attributed to “just ‘the change’, love”, and, in turn, going to be offered sex hormones more often as the solution?
Burning, tingling, crawling, buzzing, humming, zapping, pins & needles, numbness: our patients often tell us about strange sensations they have in various parts of their body. It’s typically not their major concern, but they mention it as an aside, a curiosity, ‘another weird thing I get’. While they may have trivialised this, relative to their ‘real issues’ [insert gut, hormonal, mental health] we should do the opposite and bring this concern to top of the list to correctly identify the cause.
If bilateral sensory nerves are mis-messaging it typically means 1 of 2 things: 1. Nerve damage is occurring – and if allowed to progress this can become irreversible or extend to motor and central deficits 2. Nerves are irritated or impaired – and this tells you something ‘systemic’ is out of whack and these sensations are often the only alarm bell
The top cause of paraesthesia, falls into the first category and is of course diabetes – and yes even now diabetics will walk into your clinic not knowing they have this (a good old HbA1c should be routine to rule this out). Second on the list is alcohol dependence. The third most likely explanation for the patient with paraesthesia is nutritional. And in contrast to what many of us might incorrectly think, there is a long list of nutritional imbalances that can be responsible for either, nerve damage or irritation, and B12 deficiency is not in fact the most likely.
That’s right all you nutritional ninjas🐱👤 – that makes the correct identification of the cause & the solution our bag, right? I mean who else is going to do this, accurately?
Asking the right questions about these sensations helps you to quickly confirm when a nutritional cause is likely. From there we need to know how each single micronutrient excess or deficiency or in the case of some, ‘sort of single’ nutrients (we all know people who sit in this category, right?! So why not nutrients 😂) are likely to present, via ‘easy-to-spot’ key characteristics that cover: pattern of distribution, speed of onset and progression, risk factors, accompanying features etc. In our final New Graduate mentoring session for 2021, a practitioner presented her patient who rated her concerns as 1) Fatigue 2) PMS 3) GIT issues & 4) Tingling & crawling sensations across limbs, face, lips and tongue…and I was like, whoa stop right there, you might just have given us the answer to all of the above~!~! Seriously. Here’s a clue: it wasn’t oral allergy syndrome and it wasn’t B12. Can you pick it?🤓
The Patient with Paraesthesia – Part 1 Patients often mention experiencing peculiar sensations: crawling, tingling, burning, as an aside, as a ‘oh and by the way’. But while it may not be their top priority – it should be ours. That’s because nutritional imbalances are the 3rd most common cause of these and timely treatment is essential to prevent progression to more serious issues. The list of potential nutrient deficiencies and excesses behind these, is long, but this recording, the first part of 2, will help you narrow the differentials, nail the diagnosis & the solution.
The Patient with Paraesthesia – Part 2 In this continuation of this topic, we discuss several less talked about nutrients whose deficiencies drive potent pathology for the nervous system & move onto a cluster group of minerals, whose imbalances create functional irritation rather than organic change. This episode includes a range of excellent resources from videos demonstrating in-house tests you can perform to aid diagnosis, as well as our own Ready Reference which assists correctly categorising the different paraesthesia patterns and the nutrient issues behind them
You can purchase The Patient with Paraesthesia Part 1here and Part 2here.
BUY PART 1 & PART 2 TOGETHER AND RECEIVE 10% DISCOUNT BY USING CODE BUNDLE12
If you are an Update in Under 30 Subscriber, you will find it waiting for you in your online account.
You can become an Update in Under 30 Subscriber to access this episode and the entire library of Update in Under 30 audio’s and resources here.
I’ve been known to give calcium more attention than most and now I feel vindicated. Serum calcium, of course is not a reflection of your calcium intake, calcium losses nor overall calcium status. In this regard it is totally useless. But my fixation is about what even slight variations away from healthy levels of this mineral can reveal.
You’ve probably heard me openly scorn the parathyroid glands
“How hard can it be? These glands have just 1 job: keep the blood calcium in range! Snort!”
And that is exactly why it is so meaningful when this appears to be a ‘big ask’ and the serum calcium slips under 2.2 mmol/L or over 2.45 mmol/L & so potent given the huge chain of physiological reactions that follow from such a small shift – producing profoundly negative effects on vascular dynamics, neurological function etc.(more…)
It’s not sexy but it is one of my favourite deficiencies. Favourite because it’s incredibly common…make no bones about it (tee hee)! Favourite because a deficiency is actually reasonably easy to recognise once you know how (watch increasing phosphate levels especially over 1.2 mmol/L in particular in adults) rather than wait for a recognisable clinical deficiency picture because if you wait for this your patient will have probably had osteopenia if not osteoporosis for a decade already! Favourite lastly, but most importantly, because correction of a calcium deficiency has led to some of the most diverse but impressive improvements in people’s health that I have seen – from better menstrual regularity and less luteal phase symptoms (see the fascinating research on this also by Thys-Jacobs 2007 https://press.endocrine.org/doi/full/10.1210/jc.2006-2726) to improved pain control in fibromyalgia.(more…)
Over 20 years ago (ouch!) while studying at Southern School of Natural Therapies, I heard for the first time that calcium perhaps had a ‘dark side’! At the time, and still to a large extent now, calcium is publicly portrayed as something you simply can’t get enough of and 20yrs ago this idea was almost heresy! Certainly in the eyes of the dairy corporation at least 🙂 Yet there had been a long-standing concept in naturopathic nutrition that the distinction between calcium’s healing and harm all came down to where it resided in the body, e.g. bones Vs blood vessels. Last week Medscape ran an editorial espousing the same concept. (more…)
Burning, tingling, crawling, buzzing, humming, zapping, pins & needles, numbness: