Are There Any Holistic Health Conferences?
The brother/sister team of Ryan and Cassandra Grant think so and they’ve produced the video linked below providing the details from their 2nd trip to the conference. Although the Paleo f(x) conference in Austin, Texas does not market itself as a Holistic Health Conference, the recent trends toward ancestral and holistic health make it a good conference to go listen to speakers and vendors on holistic health topics.
What is the Paleo f(x) conference in Austin, Texas?
According to their description on their Paleo f(x) website, the conference is “the world’s premier wellness event, covering the 7 pillars of health – physical, mental, emotional, relational, spiritual, financial, tribal, (and more!) – for optimizing your health, expanding your mind and reclaiming your freedom. If you are a health enthusiast, health leader, or healthy product pioneer, then Paleo f(x)™ is the community you’ve been seeking.”
Who are Ryan and Cassandra Grant?
According to their website for their company at https://www.solefit.ca/about-us/, they are the brother and sister team that operates SoleFit.
“SoleFit, a pedorthic clinic in Westboro, Ottawa, and Kitsilano, Vancouver owned and operated by the brother/sister team of Ryan and Cassandra Grant. Since opening in 2005 in Ottawa, we’ve always prioritized ensuring that our patients understand their treatment plan. With the vast assortment of treatment/product options available, we want our patients to leave with the peace of mind that they are armed with not only the necessary tools to treat the injury, but also the information to prevent it from reoccurring. Throughout our 1 hour assessments it is our goal to help identify the root cause of biomechanical issues or injuries and to make recommendations on how to resolve them. Treatment may require any combination of footwear change/modification, custom orthotics, over-the-counter supports, gait retraining/technique changes, bracing and/or recovery product, or referral to allied healthcare professionals. Let us help you get back to your active!”
Video Transcript
Hey guys. So we recently attended the Paleo f(x) conference in Austin, Texas for the second year in a row. And far from being just a paleo conference, it’s more of an ancestral health conference that brings together some of the top neurologists, cardiologists, MD’s, and researchers to talk about everything from nutrition to sleep management to dealing with stress to optimal movement patterns. I mean really everything from stem-cell treatment to genetic testing. And so why would a pedorthic clinic be interested in this kind of a conference? Well, we find it’s really important for a specialist’s role to include a holistic look at the cause of the injury or the illness. And the sweet spot is that if we can use our specialist tools to get someone better faster, but then take that broader picture look as well, it almost always leads to better long-term outcomes.
So we just wanted to summarize some of the key points from the conference – we will have specific videos for each topic later, but here are some of our key takeaways.
So the first real overriding theme was the importance of a good diet. And whether or not you’re paleo, you’re primal, you’re vegetarian, you’re vegan, a good nutrition plan is so important in terms of treating and preventing illness and injury. And so anytime we do physical activity there’s a little bit of wear and tear. That shouldn’t be a big deal – it turns into a chronic inflammatory state when the gut and our general system are inflamed from poor dietary choices. So being runners and active ourselves, this next one has been a bit of a hard lesson for us to learn over time but it’s just so important that your exercise intensity matches up with your health goals. We see so many patients coming through where injury and illness that they’re suffering from can a lot of times be related back to training errors. So either, in a lot of cases, training a little bit too hard when you’re supposed to be going easy, or not maybe training hard enough when you’re supposed to be training hard. I mean I think the first rule of training is the reason you’re doing this is to get stronger, not to go out and train every day. And one of the problems with endurance athletes is this ‘more is better’ mentality that the more miles you put in the faster you will be, the more efficient you will be in your running economy, the better you’ll burn fat and it doesn’t exactly work that way.
So many great new products out there these days. Metrics and supplements to help optimize our health and we’ll have a specific video in the coming weeks diving into some of the specifics but an overriding message from a lot of the speakers on these bio hacks was that really 95% of good health can be achieved through good diet, good sleep patterns, and managing stress. And then really using these tools, these metrics, and these supplements to get that extra 5%.
Now that being said, a common metric that a lot of the speakers talked about was the value of heart rate variability which we’ve talked about in the past. Really one of the only things that I measure every day especially when I get out of bed or before I get out of bed in the morning for about five minutes this heart rate variability or HRV. It allows me to look at my sympathetic nervous system and my parasympathetic nervous system and make a call on the fly about how beat up my body is. So I’m sure that many of you heard about this next one but you know when our bodies become inflamed for whatever reason it can really affect our body’s ability to be able to recover from injury and from illness.
Research over the past several years has shown that systemic inflammation can be caused by things like poor diet, not getting enough sleep, not enough exercise or too much exercise, poor gut health from things like antibiotics, not eating enough fermented food, or fermentable fiber. All of these things end up producing inflammation systemically and that systemic inflammation can significantly worsen any musculoskeletal problem that we have.
So another one that we’ve heard a lot of the speakers talking about was the value of high-quality bone broth for not only protecting our gut and optimizing our gut health but also helping to protect our joints. You know most of us today, most of the amino acids and proteins were getting they’re more for muscle building, they’re not for joint ligament building and that’s why we need collagen. Collagen is the main compound in bone broth that makes it so beneficial.
Genetic testing and genomics was another really interesting topic that they talked about a fair bit and it’s quite surprising how inexpensive it can be these days to map out our entire genome to guide our lifestyle choices based on predispositions that we may have. Now a takeaway here though was that – which is good news – is that we can control how our genes are expressed. Now we may not be able to control what we get from our mom and dad, but we can control through diet, through sleep, and stress how they’re expressed. So that old debate of nature versus nurture it really looks like nurture is winning that battle. Well, it’s about taking an individual looking at their genomic blueprint and actually creating a health and lifestyle plan around that individual rather than taking this larger concept and saying this is a perfect diet for everybody. It doesn’t work that way.
Video Summary
We recently attended the Paleo f(x) Conference in Austin, Texas for the second year. For from being just about paleo, this conference is more based on an ancestral health model and brings together some of the leading neurologists, cardiologists, MD’s, and researchers from across the globe to talk about everything from nutrition (paleo, primal, vegetarian, vegan etc) to sleep optimization to stress management to genomics to optimal movement patterns. Interview clips from Robb Wolf, Mark Sisson, Chris Kresser, Dr. Josh Axe, and Dr. Daniel Stickler.
For a full blog post see: https://www.solefit.ca/health/top-health-tips-one-worlds-premier-holistic-health-conferences/
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