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So I'm Kimberly King, and welcome to the mother's market radio show, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's show, about 45 million Americans suffer from chronic headaches, and we're gonna find out what you can do besides taking two and calling your doctor, let's... We'll tell you what's going on around town. And give you a chance to win a 100 gift card. But first up, we're going to discuss headaches, something I know so much about, unfortunately, but joining us is the other experts, today is nutritional consultant and certified natural health professional, Valerie home baller appears in front of thousands of people each year and speaks on a variety of topics even host your own radio show, and she's such a wealth of health and nutrition knowledge, we wanna get right to her and welcome her back. Valery Hall, how are you?

Great, Kim, how are you?

Well, I'm doing fine, I don't have a headache today. That's a good thing. Or good, good.

Let's talk a little bit about your knowledge and let's get to find out about your background. Well, I do nutrition education all over the country now and have my own radio show, and just love everything that I do in educating on nutrition. I love to tell people about the natural ways to take care of their health because there's always a good natural way to start, so that's what my expertise is, and I travel all over... Enjoy doing seminars. I also talk to people who work in health food stores and educate them on various things, so I love what I do, and I also have a personal consultation practice, you know what's so nice is that you could tell it, you love what you do, you have your passion and it exuded right through the microphone, so it... Well, today we are talking about headaches, and I didn't mean to come across this is that I was a professional, but I do get hit aces and you always come to my rescue, so let's have you come to the rescue for all of us here today, so Valerie let's talk about headaches. It seems that everyone gets them one time or another in their life, what it is the cause of a headache... Well, there can be several different factors that are causing it, and they're a variety of different kinds of headaches, there's distress headache, there's a sinus headache Where you getting some mucus and pressure in the sinuses, which translates into our headache, there are migraine headaches and cluster headaches. migraines are really difficult and those things can last for days or even longer, so those can be also accompanied by vision problems, sensitivity to light and nausea, so if you have those components, it might be a migraine type of headache, so there are variety of different things that we can do... Sometimes it's airborne allergies, but they will go over all of the things that we can do for these different types of headaches, and there are some foods involved, I believe if people are getting chronic headaches, something is going in their mouth on a regular basis that their body doesn't like, and they don't realize it. They don't realize it's driven by a food, so we'll talk about that. And one of the most common reasons for people getting headaches is magnesium deficiency, magnesium is a fabulous cure for headaches, it is the best remedy is my number one recommendation. We're gonna talk about different kinds of magnesium a little bit later, but that's really the major key I have to hear all about this magnesium. Yeah, this is... This sounds fascinating. Okay, so we were talking about food. We're talking about stress and allergies too. This is interesting as well. An allergies, food allergies. Low blood sugar. Let's talk about that a little bit too.

You know, one of the main symptoms of a low blood sugar is a headache, and I know this intimately because I'm a type 1 diabetic, and if I mis-calculate, I can drive my blood sugar down really low. The first thing that happens with low blood sugar is it's very difficult to concentrate, you can't even add simple numbers, that concentration goes out the window. The next thing that might happen is that my hand start... Might start to shake a little bit. If it goes on longer, I would break out into a sweat and then a headache would develop, so this is especially difficult overnight if I wake up with a bad headache in the morning, unless I've had too much wine to drink the night before, I know I've had a low blood sugar during the middle of the night, and that's what has caused it, so in fact, the wine and the alcohol also pulls magnesium out of us, so a large part of the hangover headache is also a lack of magnesium.

Oh, that's very interesting.

So low blood sugar, if you tend towards that, make sure that you eat frequently and have a little snack before bed, especially something with some protein and fat, like maybe a little piece of cheese and some apple, or a little bit of a handful of seeds and nuts it doesn't have to be a huge meal, but just a little snack of something that's gonna sustain you overnight would be good, and eating every few hours, if you tend towards low blood sugar is a great idea.

I know, I like apples and peanut butter.

Oh yeah, it's good.

Okay, let's talk a little bit about... Okay, well, we talked about causes too... Yeah, let's look at some of the other causes.

So we've got these different things in the food supply, let's go into our foods a little bit, because some of the foods are what they call triggers to headaches, and some of them are a food sensitivity problem, and I'll differentiate what those are... Food sensitivities means that the body thinks of the food is a foreign invader rather than a food amounts a big immune response, and I believe a lot of headaches have to do with these food triggers and food sensitivities, the most likely foods that are the triggers.

Let's talk about the triggers. First, the number one food thing in our food supply that creates headaches is called Esper team esporte is sold under the brand names of equal and neutrality. It's an artificial sweetener. It's got a 100 side effects on the top side effect is headaches, if you are using diet products, diet soda, this is a big headache cause it also doesn't work as a diet thing, if you heard in the news recently, diets makes us gain a more weight than regular soda, so it's certainly not working for us as a diet product, avoid this stuff is... It kills brain cells, another reason it gives us a headache, so we don't wanna be doing that. It's a huge problem. If I wanna charge of the FDA, I'd make some big changes.

That would be one of them.

They never asked me to turn it to that.

So avoid the Aspartame. The next one is MSG, which stands for monotonic glutamate. It's a flavor enhancer that's in a lot of processed food, it's designed to stimulate our cravings in our taste buds to want more and more... The old potato chip commercial, it says, I bet you can't eat just one. That's 'cause it's coded with MSG. The problem with MSG is that it is rarely listed on a label, the FDA allows it to be called 50 different things, something is innocent sounding as spices or natural flavors might be MSG.

So if you get away from processed food, you get away from aspartame MSG, and these are the two things they put in a whole separate category called Excite toxins. Well, that doesn't sound very good for us, does it?

And they over-excite the brain cells to the point where they kill themselves, I believe these are some of the big causes of the rise in dementia and Alzheimer's going on in our country today, and so we wanna avoid those foods, nitrates in foods can also create headaches that's another common trigger, so process deli meat, things like your Smoke turkey, your ham, your sausage or hot dogs or bacon, all of those things have nitrates in them, so you wanna get in the health food stores, you can find versions of those things that are not traders I would recommend that.

So the aspartame, MSG and nitrates are some of the most common food triggers, and some of the other things that can trigger that would be Thiamine, which is in cheese, chocolate, citrus fruit, coffee, cold cuts, smoke, fish wine, alcohol, sausage, sour cream and vinegar, he that...

What am I gonna eat? Oh my gosh.

So it may or may not be those things, but I think even bigger than those triggers are the MSG, the asper tan in the nitrates are the ones I would really watch out for as far as the food sensitivities go, those happen when we over-eat the same foods over and over.

So in the United States, on most common food sensitivities are wheat and milk, because we've basically been taught to eat those with every meal from the time where six months old, so we eat those every single day all the time, and then the body over reacts to them over time, the flip side of a sensitivity is craving, these are things you are completely addicted to, so if you need a huge glass of milk with every meal and you're getting headaches, chances are milk is your problem, if you want bunches of bread all the time, then chances, our wheat is your problem, so I would recommend trying some different things, almond milk is an excellent alternative to regular milk, and a lot of people who have sensitivities to cow's milk do fine with goat milk, seem I try go milk and it tastes just like cows milk, you can also try the rice milk or the hemp milk, I'm not a big fan of sawmill because it is not fermented and it has to be... If you go show milk, at least go with organic, but it's not my favorite, I would rather go with almond milk or hemp milk or rice milk as an alternative to milk, and then there are plenty of other grains other than wheat, so you can certainly find other things that are good, they make some wonderful trackers that you can find at mother's, things like Mary's Gone Crackers or Dr. cracker or thin crisp from Finland. All good crackers that don't contain wheat, so you can find some various good things, my favorite bread company you can find at mother's is Julian bakery, and they can find wonderful high protein, high fiber breads, some of them do have wheat, but some don't... So you wanna read the label and take a look, they have a lot of gluten-free and you restart gonna ask you... And that would be the same as gluten-free do correct.

There are various grains that contain gluten, but the number one way we get gluten is through wheat, so if we can avoid that, a lot of us feel a lot better, MOKA and what about the headaches and... Correct, so those are some of the foods. Sugar can also cause headaches, usually because it un-balances the blood sugar, it makes it climb up only to crash down later, so that might be a factor, particularly if you got those low blood sugar things, in which case, I recommend using the Stevia as a sweetener and I love the flavor drops taste the best.

Okay, I would imagine that with drinking water, that would just probably flush their water, cure pain of any kind is usually a symptom of dehydration, headaches are no exception, so you wanna be drinking plenty of water, and dehydration also can lead to constipation comes to patients and other big cause of headaches because if we're holding our toxins in too long and not flushing them out, we end up with a toxic overload in the system, constipation is defined as not having at least one good bow movement a day should be easy to get up and have a bow movement the morning, and that is beneficial if we're not having that, then our good friend magnesium, which is... I'll tell you which magnesium to take here in just a moment, as far as which one to take to help loosen up the digestive tract, but magnesium is going to help address both constipation and headaches and sleep and muscle spasms, and a stress on and on and on and on magnets, one of my very favorite things, I'm gonna have to get done with that magnesium or yes, you're gonna love what it does for you.

Oh my goodness. Okay, so also breathing, I guess that's something else that we leaving with, that's one of the great strategies we can use when they're stress involved, and all of us have stress, this is a stressful time in our world, we get stuck in traffic, we might have teenagers at home, or stresses at work, maybe it's inventory time or anything, the variety of stress is a big project due. So stress is a part of our everyday lives, and some of my favorite strategies in dealing with stress are breathing exercises, just 10 deep breaths can change the way you feel, so... Inhale through your nose, hold it.

Just really do that 10 times and you go, Oh no, that feels better.

I somatostatin can say that to their mom...

I love it.

So you can do breath work classes, they offer classes, they probably have books or videos available at the library that you could check out, so there are all kinds of different ways, we're just doing a variety of breathing exercises. My other favorite stress-reducer is yoga, any slow stretching exercise, you wanna stretch to the point where it's comfortable it, but you can still feel a stretch and hold it for 30 or 60 seconds, you want... That's the real advantage while you deeply breathe... Oh my goodness, if I do my yoga class once a week, I feel better at the whole week long, and I try to do a series of little stretches before I go to bed at night. So that's another great thing. So stretching and breathing are some of the best natural strategies for stress and then avoid caffeine and sugar and chocolate, those can be big stress producers as well, and if you have those low blood sugars, you wanna make sure you're snacking frequently, so exercise of all kinds will help with the stress. And speaking of exercise, I'd like to go over a couple of exercises you can actually do that are specific for headaches, you know what, we will do that and in just a moment or a... Talk about that after the break, but you've picked all of our interests, so we'll be talking more headaches and exercise and the benefits of that when I will be right back. This, and we'll come back to the mother's market radio show, and we wanna take time to remind you that if you missed any portion of today's show, we can find us on iTunes by searching mother's market, or you can download the podcast from our website, brothers market dot com, click on the link for radio and listen to our past shows. Plus, you can always download our Healthy Recipes and money savings coupons, all available at mother's market dot com. And now, back to our interview with nutritional consultant, Valery Hall, and we're talking about headaches and what you can do about them, we just talking about exercises specific to reducing headaches and Valerie, you're gonna show me and what we were gonna tell this in or about what exercises we can do absolutely no paying special attention to the neck and shoulder area is great, so some little neck rolls every morning and night can help to keep those muscles loose, you can just look over one shoulder and then slowly let your head fall down and go up to the other shoulder.

So you're kinda going back and forth that way. And then that's a nice little gentle exercise, old neck rolls are very good.

Also, when you get a headache, check the back of your neck with your hand, often times there's a big... Not in the back of the snetterton.

Yes, that's a real stress. That's a ball of tension, tense muscles right back there that will not start rubbing it back and forth, you'll feel it kind of move under your fingers, if you can rub it for five or 10 minutes, it will vastly diminish your headache, you wanna... It slowly gets smaller and smaller and smaller, so if you can do that for five to 15 minutes, you can really diminish the headache just by rubbing the not... So that's a really good thing.

A lot of other things, there are some scalp massage tools available in various places, some of the health food stores have them that are kind of scalp things, there's one that you can buy at JC Penny or Kmart, called a Sotho machine, where you lay your head down and you put your neck in it and it's got two massaging balls that kinda make circles on either side of your neck, so that's a really nice one for that stress in the neck. Very good also. And you can also try massaging the upper back and neck with ice wrapped in a hand towel for relief of headache, that cold often helps, you can even wrap it in, kind of twist it and use it yourself by just pulling it back and forth with each hand as it's across your back... Or if you're lucky enough to have someone to do it for you, that would be ideal.

So some of the other things that can be helpful or massage and chiropractic, especially when the Chiropractic is really important, if there are structural mis-alignments that are leading to headaches, I know a lot of people get great relief from headaches with chiropractic, and then TMJ can be another thing that causes that, so sometimes just stretching out your jaw muscles at night is really good, a warm bath with a few drops of lavender essential oil is really relaxing, also using Epsom salts in your bath is good, another good way to get magnesium because that's magnesium you can absorb through your skin.

So sometimes even a warm shower can help, so one of the other things that's really cool is called, it's a type of water therapy, and if you put your feet in warm water and put a cold cloth across the back of your neck and or your forehead, that will help pull the blood away from your head and down to your feet, and sometimes it's that pounding sensation of a lot of blood going through the blood vessels, it can help drin pull some of it down towards the feet a little bit more. There's also a little ACU pressure point in between the thumb and the fore finger, so that little flap of skin there, if you pinch that really hard in pinch, that little accurate point can be helpful as well.

So there's some interesting little things that you can do in the way of rubbing that not in the back of your neck, doing some neck exercises using some water therapy and the ice and the hot can be very helpful in terms of our headache pain. And I've done some of those and some of those really do work, it's amazing, and that when you really have a headache, you'll do anything... That's right, that's right. Okay, I wanna hear about this lack of magnesium and what we can do with the problem and so many health issues, but what kind of magnesium is best to take and how much did we take each day? Absolutely, you know, magnesium is critical in so many different things, and about 90% of Americans are deficient in magnesium, so there are a million reasons to take it, it's excellent for stress. It relaxes the mind if you jump at loud noises, stress out over everything, worry about things you're tense and anxious, that's all a cry for magnesium if you are also very good for cramping, leg cramps, Charlie horses, toes, the cramp over each other, even resist leg issues are often a lack of magnesium-driven, it regulates heartbeat, and so if it's going too faster and regularly, that's off on a lack of magnesium, it's also good for blood pressure 'cause it relaxes the little muscles around our blood vessels. Magnesium is a natural muscle relaxers, and part of the problem is that we are told to take too much calcium and calcium mix muscles contract, so back down on your calcium everybody.

Even if you have a bone density problem, I like the range of 500 to 700 milligrams a day of calcium, not a huge amount of calcium is working against us making everything tighter and tighter and going to the wrong place in the body, and then for magnesium amounts I like 400 milligrams to 100 milligrams. 40 is a good starting place, but I would rather see us all build up to higher amounts because magnesium deficiency is now being linked to developing cancer, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and osteoporosis, so it's one of the key problems and a key deficiency in our society. It is my number one thing for headaches, whether they are migraines, regular cluster hangover, magnesium is the key for all of those, so I love magnesium for this.

There's one kind of magnesium I do not recommend, and that's Magnesium oxide, throw your magnesium oxide away, it is useless, it's not well absorbed in the body, it's gotta be a better absorbed form, so citrate is good, glycine is good, Malla is good. They're a variety of good forms of magnesium, how do we know that where are people getting that the oxide is in many multi-vitamins, many bone formulas and some individual ones, and what you wanna do is take your bottle and turn it around and look for the reading for magnesium on the nutrition facts label, and in parentheses after that, it'll tell you what type... All of these are called key lathes where they put an amino acid with the mineral and they're all designed as carriers for absorption. My two favorites, Magnesium citrate is the one to choose if you tend towards constipation, Magnesium citrate will pour more water into the ball, and remember what I told you that constipation is also adding two headaches, so this will help. So if you have both constipation and headaches, Magnesium-citrate is an excellent one.

There's a great one by natural factors, it's 150 milligrams per pill. I recommend starting with three a day, one with breakfast, lunch and dinner, and then you can adjust up or down, depending on how that feels on your digestive tract, the other kind of magnesium that has the least effect on your digestive tract is magnesium glycan at. And you can find that in the doctor's best, high absorption magnesium, so that is the least effect that will not cause diarrhea and looseness in the digestive tract, so if you're already fine or we'll lose already, then that's the one to choose. And again, you could start with three a day and go up from there, if you're getting cramping in the middle of the night, which is very common for leg cramps and resist leg, definitely bedtime after dinner would be excellent times to be taking your magnesium. It's very important for sleep, it doesn't make us drowsy, but it's almost impossible to go to sleep without it, so it's a really important thing for sleep, I definitely recommend... So my doctor's best, I take two every night at bed time, and that keeps the cramping away, it's wonderful for the sleep quality, keeps you sleeping better if you wake up in the middle of the night, it's another good thing for that as well.

Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask if a lot of people that have a problem sleeping, you just want that just that nice extra coding of knowing that it's just a peaceful way to sleep... Exactly, almost every single kind of headache involves a lack of magnesium, so that is your number one key, there's some other great nutrients as well that can be very helpful for us in terms of headaches, there's a wonderful couple of products by a company called Clear products, they make one called Clear headache, and they make one called Clear migraine, and they're a combination of homeopathic and Chinese herbs, and they come in little pills. I recommend taking three at a time of either of those, with a big glass of water along with your magnesium, those things knock out my headaches beautifully. And it's not addictive, there's no aspirin or ibuprofen or anything like that in it. And they're not habit-forming, so they're really an excellent natural way to help to decrease headaches, so those would be my top two things, the magnesium and either the clear migraine or the clear headache. Use the queer migraine if you also have the sensitivity to light in the stomach upset, that's got some things there, I believe that the bottle tells you to take two or three... I recommend three, you need a big amount of these three at a time, and the water is really important to make sure you drink a big glass of water with it, that's also going to be very helpful and it gets it into the system faster.

I was just gonna ask you... Well, you said that... Do you know how long it would take for it to really take effect?

It generally, if I take these, my headache is gone in a half an hour, well, so they work very, very quickly. So they're excellent. And if somebody weighs more weight, say over 200 pounds, you might even go with four at a time of the clear headache or clear migraine products.

Okay, okay. And that's important to know.

Absolutely.

You mentioned, and I don't know if this is a good time to interject this, but while you mentioned it, you said something about ibuprofen, and I wanted to ask you this and then we can get back to the other supplements, but people do take ibuprofen really is... Let's talk about it, what it is to the stomach lining, to the digestive system, there are some negatives to the aspirin, ibuprofen, acetaminophen, a person, all these over-the-counter pain killers, they're very good at killing pain, but they also are harmful in a couple of other areas, in the body, first of all, digestive tract, they're very hard, both on the upper stomach and the lower GI, so one of the reasons they tell you to take these things with food is so that it's buffered against that. So if you do take them, I highly recommend doing it with something in your stomach first, and then the next thing is they stop your rebuilding processes, so they're very good for pain, but they make us fall into degenerative states, so over our lifetime, we're actually only supposed to take about a thousand of these kind of pills, but when people are in pain, they often take a 1000 a year of these kind of pills, and so that ends up... That's where you get to overload, so I recommend try these natural suggestions, first of the magnesium and one of the clear products, either clear headache or clear migraine, and those are gonna be excellent strategies so that you can minimize your use... I mean, I know that sometimes ibuprofen is necessary, sometimes that we need that, but save it for when it's really... When it really counts, and we can do a lot naturally through watching our foods, avoiding that as pertain and taking the wonderful magnesium that is gonna make all the difference in the world.

Most multi-vitamins have a good amount of the B vitamins, so you don't necessarily need to be complex if you're taking a multi-vitamin rather, fever, few and butter Burr are other herbs that are very good to help reduce the duration, intensity and frequency of migraine headaches, so those could be some other herbal options to take, if it's a sinus headache, then I recommend an enzyme called Sarah pets, and there's a good one by doctor's best best Sarah PEP days, and that's an empty stomach enzyme, although I find it works with sinuses, even if you have food in your stomach. So don't worry about that too much.

It drives up the mucus and it opens up the breathing passage ways, so when the cause is a sinus headache, whether it's from allergies or just a cold or something, congestion of some sort, that can really open up the breathing passage ways and diminish the mucus. So if you take that at the first sign of pressure, that should do away with the sign sinus headache problem.

Oh my goodness. Well, this is great information. I mean, you are a wealth of information, baler, it could be...

I need to spend a whole afternoon with you, especially on this subject too, because again, there are so many different types of headaches too, and this magnesium though, this is a very interesting topic, but with the headaches specifically...

Valerie, thank you so very much for your time, we really appreciate your knowledge and we look forward to having you on again, but in the meantime, you can get more information on Valerie. But check out our website, it's Valerie Hall, nutrition dot com, and learn more about her natural approach to making us all healthier.

We look forward to our next visit. Thank thanks so much, Kimberly.

Thanks for listening to the mother's market radio show. And for shopping at mother's market.