Stressor #4- exercise (4th and last in
the series on stressors)
Dr Russel Blaylock,
neurosurgeon and recently retired Professor of Neurosurgery at the University
of Mississippi Medical Center is one of the strongest voices in America for
managing chronic illness through better nutrition, not more medications.
His oft-quoted quip is: "Prescription medications don't cure
disease, they just stop you from screaming so much from the pain."
He now runs a private nutritional consulting business and is one of the most
thorough investigators of current research being done around the world in the
field of human health and nutrition of anyone alive today.
I took 16 pages of
notes from a talk he gave to a large audience about the value of fruits and
vegetables in our lives. His conclusion: the more the better.
There is no plateau of how much is enough. 50 different plant foods are
better than 25 and 25 are better than 10, etc. Each specific fruit or vegetable
has something special to offer and they work best, synergistically, when
consumed in combination with each other.
His information
about exercise was particularly interesting.
He explains
exercise as a two-edged sword. Just the right amount of exercise raises
the anti-oxidant levels in our cells and heavy exercise greatly decreases our
anti-oxidant levels. It makes sense when you think about it.
Take a car out on
an open road and run it at the speed it was designed to run, with the fuel
appropriate for its engine and you will actually increase its performance,
"cleaning it out and opening it up" so to speak. Take that same
car out on the open road, put your foot to the floor and go for a long time and
you will exhaust the car and shorten its life if you treat it this way very
often.
The same applies to
the human body. Our arteries are lined with epithelial cells, a
"mesh" just one cell thick. Within these specialized cells
reside about 12 nutrient chemicals that are called into action when the body
starts moving - as in brisk walking. This "cleans out our
engines" and makes us healthier at every level. We perform better,
it strengthens our brains, slows down dementia, preserves our artery health and
circulation and so on. You can achieve this with half an hour of brisk
walking a day.
But raise that up a
few notches: train for a marathon, engage in vigorous athletics several
hours a day, workout hard at the gym 5 days a week, and something else
happens. Running our body's engine at a demanding level uses up our bank
account of anti-oxidant nutrients which must be replaced daily. Where do
they come from? Fruits and vegetables. A person who engages in
vigorous exercise requires from 15 - 20 servings every single day of a wide
variety of fruits and vegetables. But what do athletes do? Most
(not all) have the false belief that being an "iron-man" or a marathon
runner makes them more or less immune to heart attacks and disease and they
often have worse diets than ordinary folk. What Dr Blaylock explained to
us is that people who engage in a lifetime of vigorous exercise (marathon
runners for example, or tri-athletes etc) have more strokes, more heart
attacks, more cancer than those who do not engage in anything more vigorous
than walking.
There was a gasp in
the room. He had the studies and statistics to back up his statements.
He explained that
intense exercisers tend to be the very ones that are hardest to convince to
take anti-oxidants. He also told us that these supplements, like Vit C, Vit E,
etc, are actually dangerous taken in isolated forms. He was talking about
anti-oxidants in food. His suggestion was to eat several pounds a
day of a wide variety of plant foods and to go easy on meat. The
anti-oxidant vitamins that are inside all fruits and vegetables are complexed
together with tens of thousands of nutrient factors that make them work best when
in their complete food-form, not an isolated vitamin.
While Dr Blaylock
is not a spokesperson for JuicePlus+ and is not connected to that company in
any way, he did mention this product by name as a must for all who engage in
vigorous exercise because it has been through the rigorous clinical testing
that proves the plant nutrients are in-tact and do get into the bloodstream and
do perform many activities that enhance our overall antioxidant protection. And
let's face it: he nor anyone else will ever convince athletes (or anyone)
to shop for, prepare, and eat 20 raw vegetables and a few fruits a day.
If the raw fruits
and vegetables in JuicePlus+ works for marathon runners, to protect them
from the storm of free radical damage that exercise causes, it also works for
all of us because every day every kind of stress we undergo, be it physical,
(as in exercise) or mental/psychological (work, relationships) or from not
enough sleep, or from the toxins in our food and air, requires that we eat
abundant amounts of plant foods, every day. The nutrients we need to
protect our cells from the aging caused by free radical damage are found only
in plant foods - just in fruits and vegetables, and the more the
better. You simply can't get too much. Eat lots of raw veggies and fruits
every day along with your JuicePlus+ to fill in the gaps of the 20 you might
not get to every day to slow down the aging process and prevent chronic
diseases. That's true science.
Mary Anne |