AUGUST 9, 2008

NUTRITION AND RECOVERY

Jill:  Welcome to the Breakthrough Addiction Recovery Hour, My name is Jill Mattingly I will be your host today and joining me once again is Dr.

Lois Dutton, welcome

Lois,

Lois:  It is so good to be here, a beautiful day, I did my 6 miles on the trail and it was gorgeous!

Jill:  You just made me speechless, that brings me to the first item, the Olympics.  You could be a speed walker right? 

Lois:  I… don’t think so (laugh) I didn’t say that I split the concrete, I just said I walked.

Jill:  Well, Dr. Dutton who I will refer to as  

Lois, we are going to talk a bit more about nutrition and I was speaking with

Lois and our engineer Gene and we had the Olympics on in the studio and how the whole world tuned in to see the Bejing opening ceremony last night,  did you see it

Lois?

Lois:  No, I didn’t

Jill:  Well then the whole world saw it and you didn’t.  (laugh)  Ok, well I just I am an Olympic freak

Lois:  I blew that one out of the water huh?

Jill:  Ok, you and me Gene.  Anyway back in 1996 I was an EMT at the Olympics and got to work the Georgia Dome, maybe I shouldn’t say this being in

Atlanta and someone may hunt me down for this but I did hang from the rings on the gymnastics floor.

Lois:  Really? 

Jill:  Do you know how high those rings are?  A guy had to lift me and I looked like an elephant being hoisted up to the rings, they had to hoist me and I hung from them and got my picture taken and I hung from the uneven bars, but I don’t think the paramedics were supposed to do that but we had a blast

Lois:  I tell you Gene, these are the things memories are made of

Jill:  I did not sleep for 2 weeks that summer, it was so much fun.

Lois:  You really are a freak when it comes to the Olympics

Jill:  I watched the first gold medal ceremony this morning and we won the first one for fencing and a female and it was a sweep.  The females from the

US won the gold, silver and bronze and I was so proud.  Anyway, we are going to get back to our subject today at Breakthrough Addiction Recovery Hour, we are talking about nutrition and how it applies to the care of someone that is struggling with a addiction on a substance such as alcohol or other drugs, a lot of times much of the things we look up on the internet about nutrition and addiction focus in on alcohol and there isn’t much that talks about opiates but we are trying to make this as general as possible so that it will help anyone that is struggling with addiction because it is tied back into brain chemistry and that is something that relies heavily on adequate nutrition. 

Lois:  Most any kind of toxic substance Jill, we know has the same kind of short circuiting in the brain chemistry and as such one of the natural ways to try and help replenish and restore and get back on an even keel is through good solid nutrition

Jill:  That is why we devoted the shows last week and this week to nutrition.  If you have someone to call and tell them to listen to what we have to say and you can call in and get in on the conversation and ask questions, call 770-226-0920 that number again is 770-226-0920 hold on to that number because later on we will give something away, I am in the Olympic mood, not my gold medal from 1974

Lois:  Not a stalk of broccoli or cauliflower

Jill : I would love to give something away, keep the number handy and I will be hopefully giving something away later on today

Lois:  Just give us a call

Lois:  That is a good ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS term.  Yes,

Jill:  What we would like to do is get further into deconstruction of how nutrition needs to be approached and construct a good understanding of how nutrition effects addiction recovery.

Lois:  To recap quickly, we know the basics that the body needs in order to nourish itself and stay healthy and alive and it’s most of the building blocks have not changed over time and they are still the ones we knew when we did the pyramid and the basic three and now we look at some six or seven different building blocks we need to stay healthy, and the number one is water and it is the universal solvent we need it in the system and an adult needs two or three huge gallons of water every day.  It’s not you can’t take a six pack of pop and get the same amount of hydration that you need with good solid water,.  The other three are carbohydrates, protein, fats, and vitamins, minerals and special supplements that we get through our intake many of these substances Jill are the things that we need to take naturally in our day to day food content and

Jill:  What are the percentages, many times they throw out how much of each you are supposed to have, just start foundationally what are the normal percentages someone should take in to get the right amount of protein fats and carbs.

Lois:  We have come up with in our research, we are like 20% of our intake should be protein, 30% fat and 50% carbohydrates, most of which needs to be complex carbohydrates and we will talk more about that when we return from the break.

Jill:  We are going to break and I want you to call this number to get in on the nutrition discussion, 770-226-0920, that number is 770-226-0920 call in let’s talk.

Commercial Break

Jill:  Welcome back to the Breakthrough Addiction Recovery Hour, that number for comments or questions is 770-226-0920 and at our break we were watching more of the Olympics and I was catching some slack for being an Olympic freak and if you are one you can call and commiserate with me, cause I think we have a lot of people that don’t catch the flame if you will, ok?  I actually was a fencer in high school and I quit because my teacher was French and would slap we with the saber when I messed up so I quit.  I could have been holding the medal!  Ok, so we are back talking about nutrition and addiction and I have to get my head wrapped around nutrition

Lois,

Lois:  I don’t know where we go from here, we just can not top talking about Jill being a fencer when she was a youngster and you know I know her as this um, very accomplished high powered and never knew you were a fencer,

Jill:  Yes, ninth grade won a big trophy and everything,

Lois:  I can see that concentration and piercing kind of demeanor that you have sometimes

Jill:  Gene is typing En guard on the screen.  Ok, we are back with nutrition and we stopped last segment with the building blocks and the percentages that are needed so let’s bring it home and talk about how does this apply to substance addiction specifically alcohol and other types of drug addiction and what I usually like to talk about is starting off with malnutrition, malnutrition means bad nutrition and there are a couple types of mal nutrition there is primary malnutrition when you are not taking in any type of nutrition at all, you have stopped eating or have a disease process that doesn’t allow you to eat but nothing is coming in, the secondary is actually the fact that you just can’t use what you are eating and this is what we see many times when people come in for addiction treatment and usually a person that is into malnourished state because of liver disease or something like that you will see them at the hospitals and find out that they are in advanced stages of the disease and you can have secondary malnutrition by being a long term alcohol dependent person and having liver involvement which means that the liver which is so important for so many functions especially the metabolizing of the food that you were just talking about.  When the liquor is not working you are not breaking down and metabolizing what you are eating correctly.  And therefore it is useless to you.

Lois:  Absolutely, even though each of these building blocks, the proteins the cars, the fats, have various mechanisms involved in the metabolism ultimately they all end up in the liver and the liver is the workhorse and is the primary organ that kind of makes the discerning hum decisions if you will of how it will utilize and what it will do with the foods and substances you put into it. 

Jill:  We see all of the important chemical actions going on in the liver and we also see that when the liver starts to fail so many other places in the body fail also and one that you would never think is the brain.  You can actually develop alcoholic dementia or what we call a wet brain because of liver failure because of long term alcohol use.  Most think of cirrhosis and that is a whole subject that is tackled during our day addiction treatment we talk a lot about liver damage just about 75% of those that come through the door go through our medical intake and have the blood work done we find elevated liver functions telling us that there is a process underway in terms of the liver starting to throw up the red flag to say there is an emergency and many times once you stop the offending substance such as alcohol you will see the liver enzymes or the labs we look at start to correct themselves very quickly

Lois:  It is a very forgiving organ to a point and beyond that point however, she and we call her “she” because she is complicated and does a lot of work

Jill:  We are talking about the liver,

Lois:  Carries a lot of weight, from womb to tomb the liver is always there and if she is out of sorts then everyone else is, so it is extremely important that uh, people understand and what we do in our psycho education is disease management concept, the more information we can give everyone about the process that they are undergoing the better able they are to manage it as they go down the road. 

Jill:  The number to call is 770-226-0920 I am giving it out because I am thinking of a friend that was speaking of her father that struggled with alcoholism and was hospitalized with liver failure and thank God he went through uh, program got away from the alcohol still had enough of his liver functioning that he was able at least to have another 10 to 15 years of life and what is so important is to understand that there is liver damage that is going on under the radar and if you do have a loved one that is drinking daily and they are drinking at the amounts that we talk about here on the show which does lend itself to addiction encourage them to have a doctor that they see regularly watch those liver functions because they will probably do more sensitive testing on the liver also possibly an ultrasound to determine if there is any other damage and ultimately a liver bIntensive Outpatientsy to find cirrhosis and it reminds me of her saying that she wanted to call us.  He was malnourished because his liver was not functioning properly, you know the way a person looks when they are struggling with liver disease, they look like they have a huge stomach, huge, and you think they look plenty nourished but if you look at their extremities their arms and legs are stick thin and usually what this is is not just liver disease and enlargement and shrinkage but it can be a fluid build up in the abdomen and because they gain weight doesn’t mean that they are becoming nourished.  So that is a scary thing if you see someone with that type of body structure and a heavy drinker they need to be seen and watched by their physician.

Lois:  We are talking though Jill about individuals that are long term users and have addictiond the liver for quite some time the early part of that I think is also important to talk about and you do a good job of that in psycho education about alcoholic hepatitis and the ultimate which is cirrhosis, would you mention a bit about that.

Jill:  Just a few minutes ago we talked about the elevated enzymes and those give us the first clue that something might be going on here, it can go into fatty liver and you start to get the fatty tissue laid down within the liver that can be seen by ultrasound and when you palpate you can feel that the liver is enlarged and that tells us something needs to be done now before continuing into the next phase which is alcoholic hepatitis which is an inflamation of the liver and you can create that by having a diseased liver from alcohol addiction, when you get to this you can see the jaundice and all of the other things that go along with hepatitis and after that

Lois, it is pretty much a progression into cirrhosis and is pretty scary

Lois:  Up to that we can reverse but beyond a certain point it is that point of no return.

Jill:  770-226-0920 if you have a question about liver disease and maybe it has affected you or a loved one, we will try to answer that and how it pertains to alcohol use and nutrition.  770-226-0920, stay with us we will be right back.

Commercial Break

Jill:  Welcome back, 770-226-0920 it is the Breakthrough Addiction Recovery Hour and I am with Dr.

Lois Dutton and we are helping people understand a bit about nutrition and to give the disclaimer, we are not registered dieticians or nutritionists, we have gathered information from amazing people and want to facilitate some knowledge.  We have a great book that we have worked from called Seven Weeks to Sobriety and we will talk about it in the next segment.  We have a call this is Dari in

Atlanta, how are you,

Dari:  My mom, I am from

EthIntensive Outpatientia and she lives there and has fatty liver problems what nutrition is good for her?

Lois:  Is you mom a drinking?

Dari:  No, and she is not smoking.

Lois:  There are different kinds of liver problems and one is nutritional in and of itself, what we put into our bodies sometimes the liver will respond and become unhealthy as a result of the intake the foods and that kind of thing, but we have got some um, kinds of supplements in the vitamins that we use at Breakthrough that we give our clients that are very helpful in helping to reverse some of this and we could recommend to you that we do some things like um, the B-complex vitamins and what is very important is an element called selenium, and a natural product called milk-thistle that has a substance that is extremely helpful with the liver and we would recommend that you try the B-complex and the selenium and the milk-thistle and all of those are easy to come by so it is not like you have to search and search to find them. 

Dari:  Thank you so much.

Lois:  You are quite welcome.

Jill:  That is a good point, fatty liver is a manifestation of liver disease and it doesn’t have to be in combination with alcohol.

Lois:  We know a lot of individuals who develop cirrhosis that is nutritional and have never consumed alcohol but have had some type of faulty metabolism or bad dietary habits.

Jill:  What we wanted to touch on were the building blocks from earlier and what goes on with each one of those when they are not used, or have been put into the diet, and what can happen when you addiction a substance like alcohol and even though you take those things in you don’t use them correctly.  The first is protein, obviously if you don’t take in protein you will see wasting away of the body.

Lois:  It is the body building of our intake and protein the amino acids that are in particularly animal protein are so vital Jill to keeping the whole biochemistry in the brain going because many of these amino acids at least three of four we know for sure are precursors to the neurotransmitters that we need in the brain that we know substances have a tendency to destroy. 

Jill:  Right, think about it, neurotransmitters like serotonin, or dopamine, if you are not taking in the right amount of amino acids in your diet, protein one of the building blocks, you are not going to be able to build your own neurotransmitters, so we can see how that will be related possibly to um, wanting to use a substance to substitute or to help the dopamine along.  Some of the psychiatrists, I went to a really good presentation on neurobiology of addiction and he talked about L-Tyrosine which is a type of amino acid using a supplement at GNC to help you with formation of dopamine.  Now I don’t recommend you go out and buy L-Tyrosine   but you could ask your doctor about it and you don’t want to take it if you are on an antidepressant it would be interesting to research it and talk to the doctor about it.

Lois:  One of the other things we know is that if something as simple as tryptophan it took a beating a while back because of the way it was constructed and marketed.  It is the precursor for serotonin and it is found in milk, a few years ago one of the things we would recommend for insomnia is a warm glass of milk.

Jill:  Why warm?

Lois:  Because it would trigger the tryptophan and it is also in turkey meat and it is an important amino acid as a precursor for serotonin.

Jill:  That is one of the most interesting thing, how we get it in our food source.  What about the supplementation, one of the things at Breakthrough is that we want all those coming through the door what they should be taking in to help with recovery.  We have five things to talk about when we return from the break and it is what we give our clients nutritionally and we give them great education too.  We will educate you when we come back, 770-226-0920, stay with us.

Commercial Break

Jill:  Welcome back to the Breakthrough Addiction Recovery Hour an we are talking about nutrition and addiction and some of the things to think about when dealing with addiction to a substance like alcohol or any other kind of drugs there are nutritional addiction treatments and a lot of this information does come from a book titled Seven Weeks To Sobriety, the proven way to fight alcoholism through nutrition.  Joan Mathews Larson, Ph.D. has some very interesting things to say in this book and it looks difficult because there is a lot to it when you talk about supplementation and

Lois:  Her entire program is based on natural supplementation to treat addiction

Jill:  That to me is something that is turning the addiction world around, or the addiction treatment world and they are listening to this.  What does the body need to stop craving and needing the substances they take in such as alcohol or opiates or amphetamines.  There are some things that you can look at nutritionally that by replacing them or making sure they have proper nutrition it can reduce alcohol cravings.

Lois:  One of the things she says that makes us chuckle is that this is a physiological disease and we all accept that we go into psychotherapy and try to talk our way out of it when in fact if it is a physiological disease we need to respond to that part of it.

Jill:  So if you took a diabetic and said we will sit you in a room with a therapist and talk you through your dietary needs and so that speaks volumes.  We are looking now in addiction addiction treatment at another part of the body which is the nutritional.  At Breakthrough we don’t load folks down with tons of supplements

Lois:  If we did we would give them 500 a day or a bucket of vitamins

Jill:  What we do especially for a alcohol detoxer and people that are early in their recovery, we have five different supplementations that we really encourage a person to use and we try to educate fully on.  Those are the B-complex vitamins, your anti-oxidants, calcium, magnesium, essential fatty acids, Omega 6, 3 and 9.  Liver cocktail, selenium and milk-thistle.  Those five different areas are the ones we concentrate on and we try to teach you why these are important and we don’t want to bog you down with huge horse pills in the morning. 

Lois:  People respond to these because the B-complex which is thiamin riboflavin niacin and folic acid all of those really important vitamins, the depletion of that particular set of nutrients it really wreaks havoc on the nervous system and the function of the brain.  Alcohol robs the body of the B vitamins and the B  vitamins are absolutely essential to get back that functioning pretty close to normal for um, the brain. 

Jill:  Exactly, and why you know you have to look at your B-complex and make sure you do have the appropriate B vitamins and some people do separate them out and have a B12 and a thiamin, etc., but what we try to do is help you to narrow it down so that it is not a huge amount and is manageable and you know why each element is in that complex.  The anti-oxidants, vitamin C, A and E, we try to teach about each one.  Vitamin C, it actually helps with uh, reversal of addiction states now, you know there are a lot of different ways to look at vitamin C and in addiction has not come to their minds. 

Lois: We also know that vitamin C helps in the metabolism of tyrosine and the tryptophan which are the amino acids needed to help restore the dopamine and the serotonin in the brain, so vitamin C is the building block. 

Jill:  Vitamin A and E, and once again you can get an anti-oxidant vitamin in the right combination also Alpha lypolic  acid is an awesome anti-oxidant and I used to work with an internist that really believed in that.  As we come to the end of this segment, I do want to say that I felt this morning when we came in that I wanted to give something away, because that is radio(laugh). 

Lois:  What, your fencing mask?

Jill:  Ok, stop.  Anyway, I would like to give away a copy of Seven Weeks to Sobriety by Dr. Joan Larson and the first caller to call will get the free copy and if you want to talk to us and then Gene will take your address and phone and we will definitely get this to you.  It is a fantastic tool, if you would like to have it.  Also that number 770-226-0920, here they come!  I hope someone does call for the give away, 770-226-0920.  Call in and get a free copy of Dr. Joan Larson’s Seven Weeks To Sobriety.

Commercial Break

Jill:  I feel like Laura Ingram the lights on the phone are lit up!  Our first caller is

Florence, how are you?

Florence:  Good Jill

Jill:  You are our first caller and we are sending you the book and it is excellent

Florence:  Thanks so much.  What a great program and it is my first time to listen and I am so glad I could call in.

Lois:  Thank you

Jill:  Thanks

Florence and Gene will get your address, let’s see Frank on line two.  How are you today.

Frank:  Good,

Jill:  Looks like you are the second caller, are you interested in the book?

Frank:   Absolutely, I have been researching this and I am 16 days clean

Jill:  Fantastic, we are going to send you a book ok?

Frank:  Awesome.

Jill:  Do you have a question

Frank:  I didn’t get all the supplements, B complex, Antioxidants, Calcium and what else?

Jill:  Well we will talk with you while others listen, the essential fatty acids the Omega 3, 6 and 9.  Ok. And then for the liver problems, and you know most people are struggling with alcohol addiction usually have a liver that is not probably telling you it isn’t doing well but if you researched it and saw lab reports and ultrasounds you would see it is so we add in selenium and milk-thistle. 

Frank:  Can I get these over the counter.

Lois:  Health Food Store Frank and look for a good balanced B because basically that would be all of the B-complex and certain like milligrams, so much of this and that, so a balanced B will give you a really good influx of all of the B vitamins. 

Frank:  Excellent, I was already given B complex to take and also I was directed toward this gluten diet?  I may have celiac disease, I originally thought it was colitis and when this hit me physically and it was scary and I was asking anyone to help me follow up .  I have copies of blood work and I don’t know what it means.  But they read it and had some big red flags,

Jill:  You have a good physician?

Frank:  Yes, I have referrals to a good GI person

Jill:  They will take an ultrasound take a look at the liver and we see those numbers quite often with people coming in that are new in recovery and once you stop the offending agent you will visibly see that going down and those are the enzymes that I spoke of early in the show, so the best thing you did was to stop the alcohol.  Then what you need to do is start adding nutrition which is what you have been lacking, your liver will reward you for this and you will see the numbers coming down and it is great that you are researching and getting on top of this, you are almost there.

Lois:  Remember what your mother told you is a fact, the fruits and the vegetables are what you concentrate on and make sure that you eat three meals a day with some snacks and do not skip breakfast and it is very important to keep going with that ok?

Jill:  Thanks for calling and what a great show

Lois, this has really been something, we have made some headway into helping people understand.  Breakthrough Addiction Recovery, 770-734-8091 to get your free consultation if you are struggling with addiction or addiction.  That finishes the show and we will be here next Saturday.  Take Care.