In the first video of this series about the 5 Foundations of Health, Dr. John Palmer discusses Foundation #1: Maximizing Brain Health as well as an overview of all 5 Foundations.
Transcript:
Hey guys, my name is Dr. John Palmer. I am one of the co-founders of Archetype in Birmingham, Alabama. Today I'm going to be talking about the Foundations of Health that we educate all of our clients on in our clinic, and also through social media, and the people that come to us from really the whole southeast.
So, we teach people about brain health. We teach people about how to use their body. We teach people how to use this through the mechanism called the Five Foundations. We start with the Foundation #1, which is brain health and development. I could spend a whole actual talk about talking about the pediatric brain or infant brain developing into the adult brain. Today what I'm talking about is just the adult brain. So the adult brain has the ability to process everything in the whole body and interpret it, and then send those messages back down to the body for a result and then it happens tens of thousands, probably even millions of times a day.
What I want you to understand is that the brain is very uniquely made up of all these different variables that come out to be you, personally you. Everyone is different. Everyone is their unique self, and so that comes down to your goals, your psychology, the information that you put in on a regular basis, the people you hang around, the people that not necessarily are family, but the five people that you're around the most is truly influential of who you truly are. It comes out to be spirituality. It comes out to be religion.
So my whole point of this is that you get an influence, and that ultimately is made up of you. So there is a philosophical background to this, but it really comes down to whatever you're in front of is actually what you turn out to be. If you have good things around you, and if you have good influences, then you're going to have an outcome of a good influence in your life.
If you have a bad influence, and you have these things that do not really serve you very well, it's going to be a bad thing. It's going to turn into a bad habit. It's going to turn into you actually doing something you weren't supposed to. The first foundation is super important in the sense of integrating everything that's in your life.
So the next portion of this is the communication between the brain and the body, so this is getting into Foundation #2. Foundation #2 is just primarily the communication from the brain, the transferring that through the spinal cord to the body, and then from the body back through the spinal cord to the brain. It's just the communication. What that revolves off of is the actual movement of the spine, the actual structure of the spine, the actual curvatures of the spine.
It truly is a dynamic communication portal because it serves two purposes. It serves a purpose of security, and it serves a purpose of mobility, which usually those two things don't go together. So if you have security, it's usually very rigid. It has the ability to protect, but in the sense of mobility, usually mobility does not have the ability to protect. That's the beauty of it. It was designed perfectly.
What I mean by that, there's a perfect design and when I go over Foundation #2, I'll get a lot more into that, but the whole thing of what I want you to understand about Foundation #2, which is spinal health, spinal movement, is that it has the ability for the brain and the body to communicate. So that's the only concept that I want to get out of that.
The third foundation, which has to do with your food and your fuel, has to do with the actual fueling of the brain and fueling of the body to make sure that it can thrive and work the best it can. So, think about where we came from. We came from the brain to where it integrates to the body, but it needs to have that highway, that communication portal of going from the brain into the body. So the brain has to be able to have the environment that it needs to be able to send those messages, but then you have to have an organ system in a body that can actually take in fuel, whether it be a macronutrient or whether it be a micronutrient, macro being food, micro being supplementation. I'm going to get more into that in another video, but what you're really getting into is the fuel that it takes to run the body, the fuel that it takes to run the brain, and those things have to work cohesively.
The fourth foundation, it's one of my favorites just because I'm a triathlete. I'm a runner. I love doing just fitness as a whole, because this really pulls in everything, is most of your brain is responsible for movement. And so you have an area of your brain called your cerebellum that is 78% of your neurons in your brain, 78%. So think about this, with it being 78% of your neurons, your body was meant to move. The crazy part is we don't move as a culture, and then when we don't move as a culture, we wonder why we start to become broken down and dysfunctional, and that really comes down to because we're not moving. And that goes down to that fourth foundation. That fourth foundation is truly exercise.
Usually when people have the word exercise come into their brain, they cringe just a little bit because they have to think like, "Oh, that's synonymous with like abs and biceps and nice looking muscles," but it has nothing to do with it. It has to do more so with blood flow. Think about what happens when you go and you run. You go do something where your heart rate increases, your respiration increases. That truly has to do with the delivery of oxygen, glucose and nutrients to everywhere in your whole body. It's literally the blood system is delivering all those great things via pumping of the heart, respiration of the lungs, and you have a bunch of other things that are going on in that period, but it all happens because of exercise.
So exercise is just the delivery of all of those things. It is the organ systems working in harmony to saturate the body with all those things I was talking about, so oxygen, glucose and nutrients.
So the fifth one, it is new, and what I mean by that is we have all these man-made things that we have in our environment that truly is not supposed to be in our body. Foundation #5 is toxin removal or toxin exposure. Why toxin exposure is so important is it is new to our environment in the past like 100, 150 years, and so you can look at toxins as the speed bumps or things that will slow down the body that were never meant to be in the body. And so you either know how to get them out or you don't, so the whole point of toxin removal is to limit, to reduce and to eliminate those things in your body. We're going to go over that in the fifth foundation video.
Truly all of those foundations are important in the sense of integration. The whole reason why we've created these Five Foundations is that we have to create a system to get people well. We have to create a map that actually gets people to the point from illness to wellness. We have to get someone from a point of wellness to optimal health. We have to get people well from many different states, and get them to just really functioning as well as they can with whatever condition of their body that it is at that moment.
The whole point of this is to give you information so you can integrate that information. You can utilize it. You can begin to improve your health. If that means that you drink more water because of that video, then awesome. It served its purpose. If that means that you want to do a 5k, awesome. It served its purpose. If that means that for some reason that you're able to influence someone and tell them about this, and they hear about it and it changes their life, awesome. Then that's my purpose of doing this.
Watch the next video in this series on the 5 Foundations of Health:
Foundation #2: Spinal Mobility & Strength
