Lung Health - 035

SPEAKER A The following program presents principles designed to promote good health and is not intended to take the place of personalised, professional care. The opinions and ideas expressed are those of the speakers. Viewers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the information presented. SPEAKER B Welcome to healthy living. I'm your host, Margot Marshall. We can survive weeks without food, days without water, and only minutes without without air. Stay tuned for vital tips on lung. SPEAKER C Healthy Living is a production of 3ABN Australia television focusing on the health of the whole person, body, mind and spirit. You'll learn natural lifestyle principles with practical health solutions for overall good health. SPEAKER B Here to talk to us about lung health is Dr. John Clark. SPEAKER A Welcome, John. SPEAKER D Thank you. SPEAKER B I understand that lung diseases are the fourth leading cause of death in Australia. SPEAKER D Isn't that amazing? SPEAKER B Oh, it's not good. What would be some examples of these diseases, these lung diseases? SPEAKER D One big one is what we call COPD. Now, what does COPD stand for? SPEAKER B I think it's chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. Did I get that right? SPEAKER D That's it. And so people end up with another term for that is emphysema. It's where the lungs are affected by pollutants, often tobacco or tobacco smoke. But it can be other things. And the little air sacs that are supposed to be individual and provide a large surface area for oxygen to get in the bloodstream, start coalescing into bigger air sacs with less surface area and less ability to transfer oxygen. And you end up with a poor ventilation, poor oxygenation of the blood. And so it takes more effort to get the oxygen into the blood. And pretty soon the amount of effort it takes goes beyond the results in life and then people don't do too well. And around seven and a half percent of Australians have COPD. That's a high percentage, actually, yes. SPEAKER B And what other diseases are there? That's COPD. And then there's what else? SPEAKER D Asthma is a big one, often starts early in one's life, even as a child. Asthma is often triggered by some kind of allergen or environmental toxin. It's where the lungs end up with the inability to get rid of air. Around each of these air sacs and at the bronchi are little muscles that control the size of the air inflow these muscles become irritated and tighten up, making it hard to get air out. And the person, if you listen to them with a stethoscope, will have a wheezing sound. And when they can't get air out, they can't get air in, they have trouble breathing. And this makes it so that they end up with big problems. And then finally there's something we call bronchiectasis, that's sort of chronic bronchitis. You think of bronchitis, if you have it too many times, you get bronchiectasis. And there's a lot of deaths from bronchiectasis and it affects a lot of Australians as well. SPEAKER B And that comes from having repeated bronchitis. Did you say? SPEAKER E Yes. SPEAKER D Lung infections or bronchial infections. SPEAKER E Yes. SPEAKER B Well, our lungs certainly are very important. What about aboriginal people? Are they affected by lung diseases? SPEAKER E Oh, yes. SPEAKER D Talking about bronchiectasis, they're six times more likely to get it and have troubles with it. SPEAKER B Oh, John, that's tragic. Yes, that is absolutely tragic. It's hard to imagine six times the amount. Why would that be? SPEAKER D They're probably on a diet that isn't as high in good antioxidants. They're probably in an environment where it's less conducive to good breathing, which we need to talk about. And they probably aren't as able to get to health care as what the average Australian might be. SPEAKER B Very sad, because breathing is pretty important, isn't it? SPEAKER D Oh, yes, right. Last time I stopped. SPEAKER B Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. So we eat three times a day and so on, water four to five. SPEAKER D Times a day and breathe 15 times or 18 times a minute. So it's very important. And you think about what you eat. Okay, I'm going to have some fruit or I'm going to have some veggies or whatever. But you don't always think about what you're breathing. Some people go in their house. They go to bed. They close all the windows. They close all the doors. They live in this room that's sort of like, closed up like a plastic bag. Well, we know if you put a plastic bag over your head and it was that small, you'd be in big trouble. But what if the plastic bag is the size of your bedroom and all night you rebreathe the same air? You think the oxygen goes up in that air? No, it goes down. You think the pollutants in that air go down? No, they go up. And maybe you have a partner in the same room and they're breathing the air. They breathe it and then you breathe it. And then they breathe it. And what happens to that air? I mean, this is like the problem of getting on an airplane. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER D People start breathing the same air. And one year they tracked the first flu cases of the year. They discovered the first man that had the flu that year got on the airplane in Washington, DC. He flew to Los Angeles. And when they got off the airplane, 29 other people now had the same disease, the first flu and spread and spread and spread. Well, the flu spread. Other things can spread. And so what you breathe is very important. Opening windows so that you have air coming in. The other factor is what is in the air from the buildings you live in. One huge problem is mold, mildew, the results of fungi growing black mold or mushrooms or whatever. And what you end up having mushrooms. SPEAKER B Did you say growing indoors? SPEAKER D You'd be surprised. I have a friend that works on air conditioners. He says he opens up the air conditioner, he might find black mold, or he might find mushrooms growing there. And no they're pretty much very similar. We don't recommend them for food either. And they aren't really good for your lungs, for asthma or whatever, because they raise the inflammation in your body. But if you have mold in your environment, you're way more likely to get lung cancer, any kind of cancer, liver cancer. You're more likely to get any cancer of an organ that's trying to get rid of toxins. And you're more likely to get the bronchiectasis, the asthma, and the COPD. You're made to breathe nice, fresh air outdoors. And if you get outdoors, especially early in the morning, you'll have more of the negative ions, more of the things that boost the immune system. There'll be more oxygen overnight. The plants will make oxygen out of the carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is breathed off by people. It's given off by animals, it's given off by vehicles. But the carbon dioxide during the night is converted to oxygen. And so if you go out early in the morning, you get more of that oxygen, more benefits. Getting outdoors will give you better lung health. SPEAKER B I love the morning air. I tend to be a morning person. And when I go for early morning walks, like just after the sun gets up or something like that, the air is beautiful. It's absolutely beautiful. But if I go a couple of hours later, as I sometimes do, it's just not the same, right? Just isn't. Make the day beautiful and fresh and crisp and really lovely. I love the morning. Yeah, I love the morning air now. So people who have this breathing difficulty, is there something that can be done, there's some help for them, or when they've got COPD, as you're talking about, is there some way that they can be helped? SPEAKER D There certainly is. And I had a gentleman that was referred to me. I was doing a set of health education meetings out in West Virginia, and the people that were at the venue said, well, we want you to see this one gentleman in our community. He has really bad lung health. He's on oxygen. And so they brought him into me, and he was willing he wasn't brought in against his will. Anyway, he and his wife came to see me, and we sat down and he told me his story, but he was puffing away on his oxygen. He had to stop and get his breath every now and then. He couldn't have walked across the room without being what we call winded out of breath. And he had been a trucker, he was a smoker, and he was trucking from West Virginia to California. And along the way, one time he had a heart attack in Tennessee. And when he had a heart attack there, they took him to the University of Tennessee. And they did everything they could for him, but his heart was totally wiped out. There wasn't anything more they could do. They didn't offer him bypass surgery. His heart was half gone, half the muscle was dead. And so he had congestive heart failure. He had COPD from his smoking. He also had diabetes, which didn't help, high blood sugars, and had had high blood pressure before this as well. SPEAKER B That's a big lineup of serious problems. SPEAKER D Yes, very serious. And so he is dealing with these, and he can't walk across the room, and they basically put him on oxygen and said, go home and you won't live long. Do your best to live your best till you die, was their advice. SPEAKER E All right. SPEAKER B Okay. So what did you do? SPEAKER D Is there hope for this kind of hope? SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER D Well, so I said, well, you're in pretty tough shape, but if you're willing to do a lot of lifestyle changes, we can make a difference. And so we have several diseases here to work on diabetes, congestive heart failure, COPD, and he's on his oxygen. So I started in with putting him on a program, giving him a schedule. It's important to keep your life scheduled. If you eat at the same time every day, your body uses the food more efficiently. If you exercise at the same time every day, you end up with better response, with your endorphins and with feeling good. And if you go to bed at a good time and get up at a good time every day consistently, you end up more healthy, less of these same diseases that he had. SPEAKER B And that includes weekends. SPEAKER D I believe it absolutely includes weekends. In fact, in studies of teenagers in high school, comparison between those who slept in on the weekend and those who kept the same schedule. Those that slept in on the weekend had more colds, more fluids, less good health than those who kept the same schedule all week long. So I guess we're not off the hook. Can't take it easy. So this gentleman, then, I put him on a good diet. The diet took away from him things that would use up oxygen. High fat diet, high meat diet, high processed food diet. Takes more oxygen to digest. It also makes the blood so it's more sticky and harder to pump through little capillaries. It also makes it so the blood doesn't carry as much oxygen. And when it doesn't carry as much oxygen, then you end up having to work harder to get the oxygen to the tissues, and your lungs have to work harder. So we gave him several foods, especially to concentrate on. Apples, for example. Have you heard it said, an apple a day? SPEAKER B I think, yes, I definitely heard an apple a day. That's such an old saying. It goes back who knows? Way beyond Grandma's Day, I'm sure. How did they know that back then? But the research is just reinforcing. That incredible saying. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. SPEAKER E Yes. SPEAKER D And so an apple a day. The studies show that when you eat an apple a day, you actually breathe an extra 150 with every breath. SPEAKER B An apple a day. SPEAKER D Apple a day. SPEAKER B Just one? SPEAKER D Just one. SPEAKER B Isn't that incredible? I don't think they knew that back then. It just seems like this is all coming out, but somehow or other there was some ancient wisdom there that just made them believe it. One apple a day. Say that again. How much? SPEAKER D Extra 150. Extra. With every breath. SPEAKER B Every breath. SPEAKER D Every breath. SPEAKER B One apple. SPEAKER D One apple. There's also other benefits to an apple for the lungs, and that is that they have phytochemicals like corcitin, which are involved in helping your immune system fight viruses. So a person that eats an apple a day has fewer lung infections. I had a gentleman that told me, yeah, I used to eat an apple a day and never had a cold. And then somebody gave me a box of oranges. So I switched to an orange a day, and the benefit wasn't there. And he got a cold that year. I'm not saying oranges are bad, but there is something beneficial about apples in the way of fighting infection with viruses, and it has to do with phytochemicals that have been studied. SPEAKER B I have a really good idea. I think he should have had an apple and an orange. SPEAKER E There you go. SPEAKER B The vitamin C is also good for those things. And maybe a mango. And we won't go on. SPEAKER D We won't go on. We're going to get hungry here because. SPEAKER B Variety is important, but that's wonderful. So there's two benefits from apples. One is you breathe an extra 150 mils of air with every breath. And the other one was the curcitin, I think you said, that fights off viruses. Viruses. So that protects your lungs from that's fantastic, isn't it? SPEAKER E Oh, yes, that's apple. SPEAKER B What have we got over here? In the fruit basket? SPEAKER D Stay away from the fruit basket. SPEAKER E Yes. SPEAKER D The next thing we had him eat was onions. Now, have you ever noticed you eat an onion and almost instantly it's on your breath? SPEAKER E No. SPEAKER D And that's because it goes right away to the lungs, and it has good compounds in it that actually also benefit the lungs for breathing and also fight viruses. And so we had him eating lots of onions and garlic both. Another thing we had him capitalize on is the benefits of grapes. SPEAKER B Okay? SPEAKER D Grapes also have good phytochemicals. Reservatrol is one of those, and those help the lungs both fight viruses and for other reasons, as antioxidants. And so we told him to eat lots of antioxidants. We pushed him to get 80% of his diet as fresh, either fresh fruit or fresh vegetables, which we kept at different meals. In other words, if he's going to have a fruit breakfast, we would suggest that maybe he had a vegetable lunch and not mix the two. People have a tendency to mix fruits and vegetables. This raises inflammation. And the lungs don't like inflammation the way a lot of people mix fruits and vegetables is they'll mix onions, which are a vegetable, with tomatoes, which are a fruit, or they'll mix lettuce, which is a vegetable, with avocados, which are a fruit. SPEAKER B So why don't we define fruits and vegetables so that people can figure out how you're arriving at this? What makes a vegetable a vegetable and what makes a fruit a fruit? SPEAKER D A vegetable is either the root, like a carrot or a beetroot or something like that, or it is a stem, like celery or asparagus. Or it can be a leaf, like spinach or silver beet. Or it can also be the flower, like cauliflower, broccoli, artichoke. It's basically the plant, the entire plant, any part of the plant. The fruit is the product of the flower, such as anything with a seed. So strawberries have a seed, avocado has a seed, a cucumber has a seed, a watermelon has a seed, tomato has. SPEAKER B A seed, and also they grow on the plant. They are not the plants. SPEAKER E Yes. SPEAKER B All right. We tend to think of tomato as a vegetable because it's usually eaten that way in a salad or something. It's good to know how you actually do differentiate. And that was important for him, especially, or anyone with lung disease, I suppose. Anyone. Even if they don't have a lung disease, it's important to try to keep them separate. SPEAKER D Separate. SPEAKER B And tell me again what it is that creates the problem. Inflammation, I think you said inflammation. SPEAKER D What happens when you have a diverse type of food intake at one meal, where different food items have a different digestive process? SPEAKER B Okay. SPEAKER D The digestive processes can't all happen at once. And so the predominant digestive process goes for the largest component of the meal, and the rest of the thing suffers. For example, if you ate carrots and peaches, the peaches would probably digest very quickly, but the carrots would take a long time, during which time the peach would be turning to vinegar, which will cause great problems for the intestines. SPEAKER B Okay. SPEAKER D And so you don't want one food to rot while the other continues to digest. The other thing is that people will have a lot of bloating, which doesn't help your lungs if you eat diverse foods that don't digest well together. And then the inflammation factor yes, the increased inflammation affects the lungs. SPEAKER B Inflammation underlies every disease, doesn't it? SPEAKER D It seems to, that's for sure. At least as far as the common diseases that affect modern people that are considered lifestyle diseases. Heart disease is an inflammatory disease of the blood vessels of the heart, leading to plaque and clot and heart attacks. SPEAKER B And certainly to the lungs. So you had him on apples and grapes and onions and garlic? SPEAKER E Yes. SPEAKER B Was there something else? SPEAKER D Well, we also had him just to eat lots of good vegetables as well. We had him eating green leafy vegetables. SPEAKER B Yeah, they're very highly respected. There's a dietitian, top dietitian in the US. Said we should have ten serves of fruit and veg, and three should be green. And that's quite challenging. So yes, green is an excellent choice. SPEAKER D Yes, it certainly is. And so we had him eating good food. The next thing we had him do is exercising. SPEAKER B Now, that would be difficult. You just said he could hardly walk across the room. So how did that work? SPEAKER D I had to convince Know. I tell him, Lola, we can take a walk. And he's like, Well, I can't get across the room without Know, without being winded, even on oxygen. So I put him on a program. And we have to talk about the exercises because they're important for the lungs. First one, though, is walking. And walking is the best exercise. When you walk, you massage your insides by moving your pelvis back and forth. When you walk, you tend to swing your arms, and that tends to keep all your chest moving as well, which helps your lungs. When you walk, you tend to breathe correctly, which is with your diaphragm instead of with your shoulders. So there's a lot of benefits just to walking in helping the lungs. And so as he would walk, I would have him look and figure out how far he could walk. Let's say he could walk 50 meters. So I tell him, go walk out your front door 25 meters and come back. I had him walk as frequently as I felt he would tolerate. And I told him, every 2 hours, I want you to go out of the house and take a walk when you get up in the morning. 2 hours later, which would probably be after breakfast, 2 hours later, which would be about the time we'd have him drinking water, 2 hours later, which would be probably after lunch, 2 hours later, which would be after another drink of water, and then 2 hours later, which would be probably after tea, which we actually discouraged. And then if there's another chance to walk, take a walk. And so every 2 hours, walk half the distance. You know, you could walk without stopping and come back. And then every time, try to push it a little farther. Don't worry if you feel like you can't walk as far toward the end of the evening because you're sort of wearing out, then just go half the distance, you know you can, and come back. And during that time, I had him practice some breathing exercises that are especially important for the lungs. Breathing exercises that have been used for people climbing Mount Everest so they could climb it without oxygen. SPEAKER B Without oxygen. SPEAKER D It's also breathing exercises that singers would use in order to hold out the long notes for a long time. They're big lungs, you know, and that is this. As he walked, he would count his steps. As he counted his steps, he would use that as a metronome or a gauge to figure out how long he was breathing in. And he would take a breath in and see if he could take a breath in over four steps. So breathe in over four steps and then I'd have him hold it for two steps and then blow it out over the same number of steps that it took him to take the breath in. In this case, four steps and then repeat the cycle. Four breaths in, two breaths hold, four breaths out, four breaths in, two breaths hold. And then once he's got that down to a pattern, see if he can increase it to five breaths in and two breaths hold, and five breaths out. Keep working up and see if he can make it up to, well, whoever he could make it. 14 or something. SPEAKER B Okay. That's a long way from four, isn't it? SPEAKER E Yes. SPEAKER D And so we got him doing all these interesting things. We gave him dietary things for diabetes, we gave him dietary things for the heart, which are quite involved. But anyway, he set out to do it. SPEAKER B He set out to do it. Now, what we're waiting to hear from you is what was the outcome of all of that and how long did it take? SPEAKER D He started improving. He took it seriously. And he did the walking and the breathing and the eating good food. And I didn't just see him every day, but after one month, he was walking a mile and a half a. SPEAKER B Day in one month? SPEAKER D In one month. SPEAKER B That's nearly 3 km. Yes, isn't it? Something like that not quite right. That's an incredible change. SPEAKER E Yes. SPEAKER B From hardly across the room to that distance. SPEAKER D He was cutting back on his diabetes medications. He was cutting back on his medications for his heart. They were coming down on the number of liters of oxygen that he was having to breathe. And so he kept improving. When I saw him the first time, his eyes were half open, he was puffing on his oxygen. When I saw him again and he had been working his way up to a mile and a half, his eyes were wide open, he was alert. We were also doing some Bible study and he joined the Bible study and he was wide awake and asking questions and thinking. And of course, before, he wasn't very alert. And so this was a very big benefit for his brain as well as his lungs. SPEAKER B That's right. Because all of these things seem to be good for everything, don't they? So he was walking a mile and a half in about a month after that time. That's an incredible outcome, isn't it? And so his breathing was obviously heaps better. How many steps was he taking? Do he know? SPEAKER D I didn't really ask him how many steps he'd gotten up to, but he started a garden, put in a chuck pin and he was getting into getting active again and no longer the invalid that he was. And last time I saw him. I didn't actually see him. I saw a picture of him. He was on the front of a magazine for a health camp, and he had been to it, and he was out there walking, looked like he was power walking, looking healthy. SPEAKER B Yeah. So he was on the front page of a health retreat magazine looking like a healthy person. That's remarkable. It's almost like you could hardly believe it's true. But I do believe you, and that's a wonderful, wonderful story. You could probably tell us a lot more about lung health, but I'm glad that you took the time to tell us that, because that's something people can actually take on board and do what he did if they want to be really well or at least make a start sometimes. People aren't always ready to just go all out like he did, but anything they do will be a help, and I think that would be tremendously encouraging for anyone who's suffering from that's a disease that you know about every time you take a breath, isn't it? SPEAKER E Yes. SPEAKER B You talked about blood pressure and another program, and it's a silent disease. You don't even know you've got it, but every time you take a breath, you know if you've got COPD. So that would be very motivating. It's not just something that you can ignore. So just in the little bit of time that we have, is there something else you'd like to just add to that? Something that might be harmful to the lungs just for the next minute or so? SPEAKER D One of the things that I talked to him about was how they heated their house. You see, in west virginia, there's a lot of natural gas, and if you have natural gas on your property, you can get it free to your building while the company takes the rest of it. And so they have a lot of these natural gas heaters in the house that have no vent on them. In other words, there's no chimney coming off of truly, I mean, it's not quite as bad as parking your car in your house and running it pretty close. That's bad because you got products of combustion coming off that heater all the time. In fact, in some states, like the state of california, those things are outlawed. But in west virginia, they're allowed. They're sort of like a ceramic heater that's in the corner, and it glows bright red, but it's running on gas, either LPG or natural gas. And so I told him they had to heat the house with something else other than that, because that would definitely compromise his lungs. Another thing, of course, that compromises your lungs is tobacco, and that's why he had gotten his COPD to begin with. And so we encouraged him. Of course, he'd quit smoking, but we encourage all people that are trying to have good lung health to not smoke. SPEAKER E Yes. SPEAKER D So that's an important principle. SPEAKER B That's great. Well, look, would you just like to review some of those things? Because if people haven't been taking notes, they might be just thinking, now, what was it again that we can do to improve our lung health? You just want to run past those again? SPEAKER E Yes. SPEAKER D The first thing is to make sure you have a good air supply. What you're breathing is important. Look for fresh air. Get out in the morning, open your windows. Make sure that you're not in a house with pollutants. Better to be on the mountaintop than down in a valley. Interestingly enough, make sure that you're not smoking so that you're filling the air with pollutants. The next thing is make sure you're eating good food. High fat foods will end up causing you to have poor oxygen. SPEAKER B And those foods that you mentioned beautiful. We need to wrap up here. So thank you so much for that. I know that's been most valuable. If you would like to watch our programs on demand, just go to our website, that's 3abnaustralia.org.au , and click on the watch button. We hope to see you next time. God bless you. SPEAKER C You’ve been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia Television.