What to eat…
The only things your body has to build and repair are the food, drinks and air you take into it. That’s it. Think about that for a moment and let it sink in – the only resources your body has to rebuild itself is what you put into it. If you want a high performance body, you have to give it high performance fuel. One of the big problems with athletes is that regular training and vigorous workouts allow them to get along with the worst kind of diet. They can ‘burn-off’ a great number of calories, but the body needs a great number of nutrients to function properly. If these nutrients don’t come from the diet, the body becomes depleted, and experiences injury, illness and poor performance.
Anti-Nutrients – Avoiding the Nutrient Robbers
Optimal nutrition is not just about what you eat – what you do not eat is equally important. Since the 1950s over 3500 man-made chemicals have found their way into manufactured food; this does NOT include the thousands of pesticides, antibiotics and hormone residues used on many commercially grown fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy products and meats. Many of these chemicals are ‘anti-nutrients’ in that they stop nutrients from being absorbed and/or used, or promote their excretion.
Unfortunately, the days when healthy eating simply meant eating a good variety of foods are gone. Now, an equally important part of the equation is avoiding harmful chemicals and protecting against those that cannot be avoided. In fact, many of today’s diseases are caused just as much by an excess of these anti-nutrients as by a deficiency of nutrients. Take cancer for example: three quarters of all cancers are associated with an excess of anti-nutrients, be it cancer-causing chemicals or excessive free radicals as a result of smoking. Many health problems, from arthritis to chronic fatigue, can follow from an overload of anti-nutrients exceeding the body’s capacity to detoxify itself. Once this threshold is exceeded, toxins such as pesticide residues accumulate in fat tissue, common drugs from alcohol to painkillers become increasingly toxic, and even the otherwise harmless by-products of normal metabolism start to accumulate, bringing on muscle aches and fatigue.
In the US alone, we consume a staggering 1 million tons of food chemicals, 9.45 billion gallons of alcoholic drinks, 56 gallons of soda pop, 487 billion cigarettes, 36 million prescriptions for painkillers, and 275 million prescriptions for antibiotics EVERY YEAR. In addition, 50,000 chemicals are released into the environment by industry and 2.6 billion pounds or pesticides and herbicides are sprayed onto food and pastures. Together this constitutes a staggering onslaught of man-made chemicals and pollutants, with undeniable health and environmental repercussions.