John Arts Abundant Living www.johnarts.co.nz

My goal through this column is to give general nutritional advice to help people improve their health.

When giving specific personalised advice we are often trying to achieve multiple goals where we try to help separate body systems. As an example, I am working with someone with several health problems including polymyalgia (PMR) and some joint problems caused by arthritis. What she did not tell me is that she also suffered from annoying night cramps.

While we have made progress on the PMR and arthritis, the cramps disappeared relatively quickly. Our aim was to reduce inflammation in her muscles and joints while improving blood flow to muscle fibres. This improvement to blood flow, in addition to the base mineral supplementation has improved muscle function to the point that the muscles no longer cramp at night. The objective with the arthritis was to reduce free radical damage to cartilage and remove any associated inflammation. This is the great advantage of nutritional therapy as it allows us to target several problems with one nutritional prescription.

While on the subject of cramps, I tend to use a triple nutrient approach. We firstly add the major minerals, especially calcium, magnesium and potassium. The calcium is needed for muscle contraction, the magnesium for muscle relaxation and nerve function, and the potassium works with the other minerals to stabilise the neuromuscular junction.

The second component is to help blood flow to muscle fibres so red blood cells can move freely even in the tiniest of capillaries. The third component is more of a supporting role to ensure we take care of unwanted inflammation affecting muscles. This is particularly important with inflammatory muscle diseases such as PMR. The lining of blood vessels has a specific type of muscle (vascular smooth muscle) so removing inflammation from the blood vessel wall will also help with cramps.

To conclude, it is important to apply nutritional therapy across all damaged systems and then sit back and watch the body's amazing healing processes allow for restoration of damaged tissue, organs and systems. The key, of course, is to apply the right nutrients at the right levels for in the right timeframe. Give me a call if you need help. To join my weekly newsletter go to www.johnarts.co.nz and visit www.abundant.co.nz

John Arts is the founder of Abundant Health. To contact John phone (local) 578 9051 or 0800 423 559.