Proper Nutrition for a Healthy Spine

Proper nutrition can lead you to live a healthy overall lifestyle, but also significantly affects your back and spine. How you eat and exercise (if you exercise) can cause you or prevent you from having problems with your joints, bones, and connective tissue. Our chiropractor in Commack can help you make easy changes to your lifestyle habits that can be particularly helpful if you have a painful spine condition. After all, the old saying is… “You are what you eat.”

What Is Proper Nutrition?

Nutrition is all of the internal chemical changes that happen as a result of what we eat (or do not eat) each day. When you are eating something that adds to your health, that is good nutrition.  Having a proper nutritional diet sounds hard and restrictive, but it is not as hard as one would imagine.

Keeping Bone Tissue Healthy

The vertebrae of our spine, like all of our bones, is made up of minerals. To keep our bones healthy and prevent them from becoming weak and more breakable, our chiropractor in Commack can teach you to put the proper minerals in our body so that the bones can utilize them and stay strong.

The proper nutrients and food for bone formation include:

• Calcium: Although normally found in dairy products, spinach, kale, and broccoli are high in calcium as well.
• Vitamin D: Healthy food sources of vitamin D include eggs and fatty fish like salmon.
• Magnesium: Nuts like almonds, cashews, and even dark chocolate are great healthy choices for sources of magnesium.

Nerve Pain Nutrition

Commonly, neck pain and back pain stem from the nerves. Proper nutrition can calm the nerves and relieve pain. This nutrition includes:

• L-Tryptophan:  Dark chocolate and rBGH free whey protein contain high levels of naturally occurring L-tryptophan. This nutrition will boost your serotonin level, calming the pain.
• B-Vitamins: Also known as stress vitamins, foods high in B-Vitamins include fish, poultry, and breakfast cereals enriched with soy or rice milk.
• Magnesium: Also known as a calming mineral, foods high in Magnesium include tofu, Avocado, Pumpkin/Sunflower seed, almonds, and dark chocolate.

Since your spine is made up of several tissues, each one needs its own nutrition. This means variety in your diet! Proper nutrition is not as boring as it may seem. If you have any further questions regarding proper nutrition for your spine, you can contact Suffolk County Chiropractic, a chiropractor in Commack.