Nutrition
Educated physical trainers will pinpoint nutritional intake as being far more crucial than the exercise itself, which merely acts as a stimulus for exercise specific adaptation. Nutrition determines your vitality and thus the body's ability to response to exercise stimulus.
"It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver."
Gandhi
Selection
- Food Standards Definitions »
- Soil Association - "Organic"
- Defra - "Organic"
- Defra - "Free Range"
- Corn v Grassfed Cattle
- BSE & CJD
- Govt Organizations
- Fair Trade
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- Fibre » Is it important? (The Fibre Myth).
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- Shop fresh » Any food that lasts longer than a week is loaded with artificial chemicals and should be avoided. Shopping along the perimeter of a supermarket is usually a good rule of thumb for picking fresh ingredients.
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- Shop organic » Not matter what any food manufacturer or food retailer says, organic goods are far superior to non-organic for a variety of reasons. Just as you get catwalk models or endurance athletes looking incredibly fit and lean, when you examine more closely or take a long term perspective, you find an entirely different picture. It's no different with plants and animal products.
Organic and fresh foods are the best sources of nutrition. The organic compost and inorganic minerals found in rocks support the micro organisms, which in turn deliver the nutrients to the plant. Plants then covert this into biomass using electromagnetic radiation from the sun (photosynthesis). Biomass simply collected by organism as one moves up the food chain. Supplements are generally a waste of money, as synthetic substances are processed as toxins by the body, and natural micro nutrients in generalized doses may not be suited to your metabolic type.
Industrial fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides might create great looking plants, but looking at their nutritional content reveals another story. Massive lean looking livestock reared on commercial farmland may seem fantastic, but the medicines, supplements, environmental toxins, sedentary lifestyle and industrial feedstock are all designed for appearance and little else.
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- Dairy » Most milks are homogenized, pasteurized and essentially no different to sugar water with a bit of colour and perhaps some fat.
Homogenized milk is produced by mechanically forcing milk through small holes at high speed. This breaks down the milk-fat globules into much smaller ones so that they become evenly suspended throughout the milk, instead of being allowed to float to the top to form a cream layer. It creates a uniform colour, removes "unsightly" fat globules, affects flavour and increases shelf life. Their small size makes digestion almost impossible. The tiny molecules enter the bloodstream directly as undigested fat. Fat in milk contains a substance called Xanthine Oxidase. When milk is not homogenized, both the fat and the xanthine oxidase are digested into smaller molecules, which are either used or excreted from the body. Homogenization allows xanthine oxidase to pass through the wall of the intestines, directly into the blood stream. Xanthine oxidase is an enzyme found in the liver of many organisms. It breaks down compounds such as the purines found in meat into uric acid, a waste product. Because this is foreign cow xanthine oxidase it reacts differently to our own version which we produce in the liver. The cow xanthine "attacks tissue in the artery walls as if they were meat in the stomach. It can also directly attack parts of the heart muscle. Lesions within artery wails result from this attack." (Pure Package - Dr. Kurt Oster).
Ironically you're worse off going semi-skimmed or fat-free.
The pasteurization process was discovered in 1864. Pasteurization is an off-shoot of Louis Pasteur's "germ theory". Pasteur had correctly predicted surgeons were killing their patients by bringing germs on their unclean hands into the medical theatre. There was no method at the time of testing whether the milk contained contagious bacterial diseases such as bovine tuberculosis, brucellosis, salmonellosis, campylobacteriosis, and E. coli thought to be easily transmitted to humans through the drinking milk. When tests became available farmers began falsifying tests. Thus blanket pasteurization was introduced. Pasteurization reduces the amount of potential pathogens, but stops short of sterilization, as that would affect the taste. Pasteurization usual entail heating the product although there are high pressure and cooling techniques which are also used. Today farm sanitization is far better and we have the appropriate tests in place to accurately check milk, however the pasteurization of dairy products continues as a safety precaution.
The problem with pasteurization is it kills off enzymes found in the milk effectively destroying much of its nutritional value. Where possible switch to unpasteurized full cream milk. It doesn't last as long, tastes better and is full of the good stuff. (Arguments for raw milk).
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- Artificial Sweeteners » If you're not going to drink water, drink a diluted sugar drink rather than a diet drink! Artificial sweeteners cost the food industry a mere fraction of the cost of natural sweeteners. Diet sodas, flavoured waters and other artificially sweetened drinks contain synthesized chemicals such as high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), Agave syrup, saccharin, aspartame, sucralose, neotame, acesulfame potassium, and xylitol. They are all unnatural and have damaging health implications. (Leave The Aspartame and MSG Alone; Beware of the Agave).
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- Fruit Juice » Fruit juice is not a replacement for water! If you're going to drink water, drink freshly squeezed juices and dilute them. Fructose is merely another form of sugar. In nature it would have been almost impossible to come across that amount of fruit we drink on a regular bases. Furthermore, it is virtually impossible to eat the amount of whole fruits that would equate to the juice found in a carton. In addition only fresh fruit juice retains it's enzyme content. Processed juice is essentially a sugar solution.
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- Genetically Modified Food (GMO) » Don't eat it. Here's is why ... Jeffrey Smith "Seeds of Deception" - GMO Expert
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- Epigenetics » Eating the right food determines how your genes are expressed. Diet affects the chemical environment of your cells, this means it can affect what genes are marked-up to be expressed or suppressed when the cells are copied. This can then be carried on during future cell copying as well as potentially being inherited by your offspring. (Epigenetics: You Are What You Eat).
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- Cholesterol » Cholesterol is vital as it is used by the body to manufacture hormones and cell membranes. Cholesterol is associated with saturated fats. The liver is able to produce a certain amount of cholesterol on its own. This is then supplemented by the cholesterol found in dietary fats. Cholesterol is transported around the body by lipoproteins (LDL & HDL). LDL transports the insoluble cholesterol model along the blood stream to cells were is is required as a building material. HDL transports cholesterol to the liver for recycling, as it is so important.
Excessive blood sugar related to dietary intake creates Advanced Glycation End Products AGEs (The American diabetes Association). These accumulate as the body is not able to remove them fast enough. It is the AGEs in fact which oxidize LDL proteins, making them abnormally small. Arterial walls are designed to allow nutrients to flow into gaps within the wall, which is how the arteries obtain their nourishment. When these abnormally small LDL are sent to carry the cholesterol to cells requiring repair, they become lodged in the arterial walls. This then causes inflammation in the walls of the arteries, which leads to atherosclerosis. Atheroscelrosis is a stiffening of ordinarily elastic arterial walls. The end result is heart disease. AGE forms cross links accelerating the growth of a crust termed "plaque" along the artery wall. This reduces blood flow, leading to high blood pressure. Chips of the plaque my also break off the wall and lodge elsewhere in the vascular system. In the heart this stops oxygenated blood getting to heart muscle, causing the muscle to die (heart attack), in the brain it starves neurons of oxygen killing them (stroke).
Smoking introduce AGEs from external sources into the blood stream and this accelerates the process. This is why smoking is associated with heart disease.
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- Hydrogenated Fats » The dietary intake of fats has been incorrectly blamed for many health disorders, such as the narrowing of blood vessels (Big Fat Lies). Historically man cooked food with saturated fats occurring naturally as lard, coconut oil, palm oil or butter. Saturated fat (primarily stearic acid) is immediately converted into oleic acid (a type of mono-unsaturated fatty acids) in our body.
In 1910 the industrial process of hydrogenation was applied to the food industry. By the 1960's margarine had replaced animal fats around the world. Hydrogenation is an artificial method of converting cheap mono saturated and polyunsaturated plant oils into saturated fats via the addition of hydrogen bonds. Hydrogenated fats become more stable and thus do not go bad at room temperature, plus they create more desirable textures in baked goods and enhance flavour. Hydrogenated fats are especially concentrated in margarines, baked goods and chips/crisps. Hydrogenated fats are thus meant to be a cheaper substitute for animal fats, however the process is not a perfect one. Not all the molecules become saturated, many partially saturated (trans-fatty acids) are also created. Trans-fatty acids are responsible for vascular and heart problems. In addition "non-organic" animal products have high levels of toxicity in their saturated fat. So one has to be just as careful when consuming natural saturated fats.
- For further information (Fats and Oils: By Paul Chek ¦ Exercise - Anthropology & Health ¦ Trans Fat Cartoon).
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