Forward to Zion: Ohio Hometown Camp Meeting 2013

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Forward to Zion

Evelyn Kissinger

Food for Thought

Hi, it's a blessing to be here with you, to come a little bit further south.

I was born and raised in East Tennessee, so you'll hear a little of that going on, but I've been in Michigan most of my life.

I became a Seventh-day Adventist when I was a senior in college at the University of Tennessee.

I met a nice, good-looking young man who happened to be an Adventist, and he invited me to the Kenneth Cox Crusade, and I was baptized my senior year in school.

I took my first job in Battle Creek, and I was a dietician there for 7 years, working at the Battle Creek Sanitarium Hospital.

I just love the history around the Battle Creek area.

As I was a dietician, going from room to room, and visiting with patients, I realized that the way we live has a lot to do with the way that we die.

After working there a few years, I decided to get on the other side of the fence and started teaching wellness programs.

I started in corporate wellness and worked in communities and churches and so forth, doing wellness programs and helping people find solutions to some of the issues in their life.

But what I love about the Seventh-day Adventist health message is about having the strongest and healthiest frontal lobe possible so that we can make the very best choices.

Last week at our Michigan camp meeting, we had the speaker Fred Harding, who is our associate director of health ministries for the general conference.

And he emphasized to us again and again that that is the bottom line for our health message.

Is it so that we can have a clear mind and make the very best choices in all areas of our life.

So that we'll have the mind to discern, that we will have the mind to communicate with the Holy Spirit.

Now, I'm a nutritionist, so you're going to hear a lot about nutrition, but I do realize that there are other areas in the health message, and tomorrow we're going to talk about more of those.

But as I've been working for the Michigan Conference for the last 10 years, it has been our desire to put product into the hands of our little churches who need a little bit of help.

They came to us, Vicki Griffin and I, and Dane Griffin, Vicki and Dane Griffin and I have been working on these programs.

And they said, we have little bitty churches, and we don't have health professionals.

We need something so that we can reach out.

And so the things that we designed are for lay people to have programs in their community, to reach out to the community with this amazing message of hope, healing, and wholeness.

Some of you may know, do you know Vicki and Dane Griffin?

We lost him 2 years ago to cancer, which was a devastating loss on every level.

It did really affect the production and the outreach of Lifestyle Matters.

But Vicky and I are still working and we have a new program we are working on now that I will be sharing with you some of the clips from that.

But the health message is when I became a Seventh-day Adventist, I was born and raised a Methodist, and I knew God loved me.

But when I heard the entire Adventist health message, the entire message plus the health message, it just made the picture complete for me.

And it's just been an amazing experience to be able to go out and help other people understand this connection.

We've been hearing a lot about the brain.

Scott has been enlightening us about some of the issues in our culture that's affecting the brain.

And I want to begin with a few PowerPoint slides of that we are just now creating.

As you came in, you got a handout called Fit and Free.

And on that handout, did you receive handouts as you came in?

So if someone would like to get some and then pass them out, that would be great.

The Fit and Free program, the beautiful graphics that you see is Mr.

He is, Eric Pletcher is an amazing artist and he has created these.

I don't have them to sell here, but you can get them online.

But the building a better brain and building a better body is the theme of what we are focusing on.

So first of all, our brain is very dynamic.

The brain is not an inanimate vessel that we fill.

Rather, it is more like a living creature with an appetite, 1 that can grow and change itself with proper nourishment and exercise.

And the impact of nutrition and exercise on the brain is quite incredible.

And here you'll see the nucleus of a neuron.

And then you'll see that there's an axion that carries messages and dendrites.

And so I want you to kind of keep this image in your mind.

But the nutrients that we're going to talk about today is the delivery system that gives the brain the fuel that it needs in order to work well.

If we don't give it the right fuel, it's not going to run as well.

And so the carbohydrates are what gives energy to the billions, there are probably a hundred billion or more neurons in the brain.

And these coverings here are called myelin sheath, and they are made of fat.

But all of those neurons are covered with a layer of fat.

And the type of fat we eat will be reflected in the type of fat that's covering these neurons.

Also, these neurotransmitters, which are in the synapse that send the message from 1 neuron to the other, they are influenced both by carbohydrates and also by the types of fats that we eat.

And so there's over 50 different neurons, neurotransmitters, in the brain.

And the ones you've probably heard about are like serotonin and dopamine, GABA.

Some of those are more of the popular neurotransmitters.

But the structure, function, chemistry, and genetics of the brain are influenced by nutrition.

So this is 1 neuron and this is the other neuron.

And here in the synapse is where all those neurotransmitters hang out.

And the types of foods that we eat are going to influence how much serotonin, dopamine, GABA, those other neurotransmitters that affect our mood, that affect our appetite, and the chemistry in the brain.

So neurons relay messages to other nerve cells, they relay messages to the muscle and different glands.

Your brain is also plastic, not like a plastic bottle.

And this will be made more clear in the little video clip I'm going to show you with a neuroscientist that I'm going to show you in just a few minutes.

But it's not made of plastic, but it's plasticity.

And that means that it's changeable, that it's malleable.

Every time you learn something new, your brain changes.

It is changing to help us feel positive or negative emotions and or take a drug that acts within the brain.

You can create, weaken, reinforce connections between the neurons And this is going to affect your future learning.

What we are learning here at this seminar in the next few days is going to change our brain.

Thinking, learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off.

I don't know if you've heard anything about epigenetics, but our behavior, what we eat, our exercise, actually changes the switches that turn genes on or turn genes off.

The anatomy and our behavior, surely 1 of the most extraordinary discoveries in the last century.

Now I graduated in 1975 and back when I graduated they said that when you're born you have all the neurons that you're ever going to get.

And all you're going to do after that is just lose them.

But that is not true, because we can create new nerve cells in the amygdala and the dentate gyrus of the brain.

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