Personal Trainer Secrets Issue Mar 26 2007

Fitness Article of the Week
Multivitamins: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Ideally, humans would eat only wholly nutritious diets rich in protein, vitamins, and minerals. The fact is, most people do not meet all their nutritional needs through their food. As a result, many of us rely on multivitamins and supplements to achieve more complete nutrition.

Question: Do you know what those vitamins and minerals are doing in your body? Do you know how much of the product your body actually absorbs when it comes to taking a multivitamin?

No Federal Regulations

Vitamins, minerals, and nutritional supplements produced and distributed in the U.S. are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. In fact, if you or I wanted to start selling our own personal brands of vitamins, mineral supplements, or similar products, we could do so without anyone, including the FDA, having a say in the matter.

This lack of regulation should sound a warning signal about these products’ contents. Most supplements on the market are basically garbage. While they may contain good-for-you ingredients, they do nothing to bolster your nutrition because your body cannot absorb them.

Nutritional companies spend thousands of dollars marketing their products to convince consumers how great they are. For example, the best-known multivitamin brands found in drug and discount stores are virtually useless. Rather than trying to dazzle you with their exaggerated claims, supplement companies would be better off spending their dollars on research to determine that their products really are benefiting you. The quality of a supplement’s contents is far more important than any sexy claims its manufacturer can make. Your main concerns should be the quality and bioavailability (level of absorption and use by the body) of any product you purchase.

Supplements Cannot Repair the Effects of Bad Eating

Hippocrates said it best, “Let food be thy medicine and let thy medicine be thy food.”

Eating naturally nutritious food is the most important aspect of your diet. The foundation you lay with proper eating habits is far more important than any food supplement you can take. Examine your eating and exercise habits before you consider seeing a doctor for almost any problem.

However, even the best vitamins and supplements available will not propel you to optimal health if you otherwise eat unhealthy food. Say your diet consists mainly of pre-packaged and/or fast foods, but you take your Centrum or One-a-Day, so you talk yourself into thinking you feel fine. Your body knows otherwise, and you may find yourself in big trouble in a few years. All this amounts to is killing yourself slowly.

Why Take Supplements at All?

Even the most healthful eater might want to consider supplements, due to the lack of nutrients in our soil. Soil in the U.S. slowly has been losing more and more nutrients each year, making our foods less tasty and less nourishing to our bodies.

The single most important health factor is nourishment. If we lack proper nourishment, we will slowly die of disease, obesity and malnutrition. Yes, extremely overweight people are largely malnourished! The way to achieve optimal health is to eat as few calories as possible, while still providing your body with the highest levels of nourishment.

This is where organic food plays a key role. Organic food has been shown to contain 40 percent more nutrients than regular commercially produced food. Add high quality supplements which provide your body with bio-available vitamins and minerals, and it becomes easy to live a long, healthy life while consuming fewer calories and still obtaining the nutrients you need to function optimally.

What to Look for in a Supplement

Almost everyone should start off with a multivitamin supplement. Multivitamins work better than taking individual supplements because they provide the body with a combination of all the vitamins a minerals it needs in a single source. The body prefers this delivery method because it can better absorb and utilize them in combination than it can when you take each vitamin and mineral separately.

Other beneficial supplements include antioxidants found in trace minerals, and some specific vitamins and minerals not contained in most multivitamins. Antioxidants contain nutrients to help fight off the oxidative properties in free radicals that cause your body to break down. Taking an antioxidant supplement will keep your body strong and healthy, allowing less breakdown.

Still other important supplements are cod liver oil, fish oil, flax seed oil, and whey or egg protein (sometimes used as a form of meal replacement).

Each individual requires different nutrients and a generic multivitamin certainly can help address these deficiencies. Remember, though, any supplement is still a synthetic and not real food. Experiment until you find a high-quality product that works for you. There are dozens of good products out there, but none is “the best.” Because we’re all unique, no single product can be all things to all people. Specialty vitamin companies do develop personalized products. By performing blood, hair, and saliva work, they determine the necessary ingredients to create the best multivitamin for an individual. As you can imagine, that level of individualized production comes with a hefty price tag.

High-quality general-use supplements are out there. They can be found at the health food store and almost certainly will cost more than the famous name brands. But if you don’t invest in your health first, every other investment in your life will be wasted. Isn’t optimal health worth the cost and effort it takes to purchase quality products?

It might sound cliché, but it’s true: You take care of your body, and your body will take care of you.

Top Multivitamins

VEMMA Nutrition Program – Vemma is a great-tasting liquid vitamin.

Super Greens / Super Berry – Great-tasting vitamin and mineral powder; regular and berry flavors.

Or contact Scott White at info@personalpowertraining for other supplement and multivitamin resources.

Post a comment in our blog, here.

Featured Exercise
Outdoor Sprints

What a workout! Go outside and sprint as hard and fast as you possibly can. Once you feel like you’re going to collapse, stop; walk until you’re no longer huffing and puffing; then, sprint again. You might call this the “Forrest Gump” workout. Repeat the process as many times as you can, or until you complete a full 30 minutes of sprints and rest, walking.

This is a very intense workout, so you need a good level of fitness and conditioning before trying it. Sprint your butt off, walk until you catch your breath, then do it again. The harder you push yourself, combined with the faster and longer distance you run, the sooner you will get in shape and the more fat you will lose.

Outdoor sprints offer fat loss and a great body at no cost, so push harder than you have ever pushed before. If this sounds too difficult, consider the payoff. Any successful athlete will tell you they have put their bodies through this type of workout challenge.

If you are in good physical health, a sprint workout is extremely safe – so remember, just because you might feel like quitting doesn’t mean you have to. In other words, keep pushing and get your butt in shape – no whining, no complaining; just results, and a happy, more confident you.

Ask Scott White | Personal Trainer

Question
The other day, my boss told my coworker to quit complaining, if for no other reason than negative thoughts can cause physical illness. Is that true – can we really get sick from negative thinking?

Scott Responds

Negative thinking can, indeed, have effects far beyond the obvious. In certain tests, negative thoughts have been shown to lower your I.Q. One reason is that negative thinking changes the physiological characteristics of the brain, impacting its functioning, which can lead to reduced intelligence in children and adults.

We give our children many tools for succeeding in school, with the intent that this early training will help them to succeed later in life. Why not also give them the valuable tool of knowing how negative thinking can affect not just their school performances, but can hurt their overall health. Why not offer them the tools they need for more positive thinking and better health. The tools to encourage more positive thinking are just as important for adults.

Negative thinking can seriously impact a person's work performance, resulting in fewer promotions and fewer earnings, and an increase in job dissatisfaction. Elderly adults also are at risk from the affects of negative thinking. Negative thinking is known to cause an increase in depressive episodes for many, especially the elderly.

The brain is responsible for receiving and interpreting the information contained in the impulses that the central nervous system creates and sends to the brain whenever we see, hear, smell, or touch something. Our eyes could not see if our brains didn't interpret the visual impulses first. We would not be able to hear or understand words being spoken to us if our brains did not first interpret the language and noise impulses for us. We would not know that a flower smells wonderful or that a hug feels good if our brains did not interpret the impulses created by scent and touch for us.

Negative thinking blocks impulses from being traveling properly between the central nervous system and the brain. When this happens, strange results happen. For one thing, our brains cannot interpret the impulses correctly, which affects how our body and brain function. We have trouble comprehending the stimuli around us (people, and things). We find it harder to remember things, resulting in missed appointments and misunderstandings with others. The hormones that control communication between the body's cells, the central and immune systems, and the brain, will not be at the necessary level to function well. This leads to fatigue, sleep disturbances, emotional upsets, physical complaints, and a susceptibility to colds and flu.

The problem is that one negative thought normally leads to another, and soon your mind is being bashed with wave after wave of negative thoughts. If you do not do something to stem the tide of negativity running amok in your mind, it can really hurt your mental and physical health.

You can begin to repair the damage past negative thinking has already caused and prevent future harm to your health with positive self-affirmations and relaxation techniques, such as deep breathing to release negative thoughts from your mind. Exercise is also a good tool tool for repairing the damage of negative thinking and to prevent future damage.

Exercise helps by increasing the hormones in your body responsible for happy emotions. Exercise can also give you a positive focus for your energy so you won’t waste time on the negative thinking that can hurt your health.

Exercise helps every part of your body work better. Visit www.personalpowertraining.net to learn more about how exercise can help reduce your negative thinking by building up your body’s level of happy hormones, enabling the body and brain to work better. Also, find the exercises, equipment, and resources you need for the best health possible.

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