I like this article because it seems to confirm my belief that life is all about stress and constantly overcoming challenges. In other words, mother nature or mother earth doesn't nourish us, she always seems to be attempting to exploit our weaknesses against us and our survival.
It seems as though eating is not just about mother nature's way of nourishing you and replenishing vitally needed nutrients and calories, but it's also about stressing you. Just another example of food, admittingly in my mind, not as important to nutrition as many seem to say. At least it argues against super foods. And it's also very critical against supplements.
I don't believe you can just eat what you want, rather it's more important to limit the amount we eat for true health and accompany that with rigorous exercise. In the beginning of this thread some tried to separate fitness and health, but I believe in many aspects you can't. If you want true health, fitness must be part of that effort, but I agree too much focus on fitness can be counter productive to health, but also too much emphasis on diet and not enough on fitness can be detrimental to overall health.
And that mindset of super foods seems to be the focus of many promoters of healthy living, i.e. they are always coming up with some sort of so-called super food, but on the exercise front they seem to think all that is needed is 30 minutes/4 times per week of moderate aerobic exercise. That's bull. You must stress yourself so you can be strong to withstand the challenges of nature.
http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence...ng-to-kill-you
It's a long article, so I'll only copy a few excerpts:
"You probably try to exercise regularly and eat right. Perhaps you steer toward “superfoods,” fruits, nuts, and vegetables advertised as “antioxidant,” which combat the nasty effects of oxidation in our bodies. Maybe you take vitamins to protect against “free radicals,” destructive molecules that arise normally as our cells burn fuel for energy, but which may damage DNA and contribute to cancer, dementia, and the gradual meltdown we call aging.
Warding off the diseases of aging is certainly a worthwhile pursuit. But evidence has mounted to suggest that antioxidant vitamin supplements, long assumed to improve health, are ineffectual. Fruits and vegetables are indeed healthful but not necessarily because they shield you from oxidative stress. In fact, they may improve health for quite the opposite reason: They stress you.
That stress comes courtesy of trace amounts of naturally occurring pesticides and anti-grazing compounds. You already know these substances as the hot flavors in spices, the mouth-puckering tannins in wines, or the stink of Brussels sprouts. They are the antibacterials, antifungals, and grazing deterrents of the plant world. In the right amount, these slightly noxious substances, which help plants survive, may leave you stronger."
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"For Michael Ristow, a researcher of energy and metabolism at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, the inconsistencies became impossible to overlook. In worms, he found that neutralizing those allegedly toxic ROS reduced lifespan, so he designed a similar experiment in humans.
He had 39 male volunteers exercise regularly over several weeks; half took vitamin supplements before working out. The results, published in 2009, continue to reverberate throughout the field of exercise physiology, and beyond. Volunteers who took large doses of vitamins C and E after training failed to benefit from the workout. Their muscles didn’t become stronger; insulin sensitivity, a measure of metabolic health, didn’t improve; and increases in native antioxidants, such as glutathione, didn’t occur.
Exercise accelerates the burning of fuel by your cells. If you peer into muscles after a jog, you’ll see a relative excess of those supposedly dangerous ROS—exhaust spewed from our cellular furnaces, the mitochondria. If you examine the same muscle some time after a run, however, you’ll find those ROS gone.
In their place you’ll see an abundance of native antioxidants. That’s because, post-exercise, the muscle cells respond to the oxidative stress by boosting production of native antioxidants. Those antioxidants, amped up to protect against the oxidant threat of yesterday’s exercise, now also protect against other ambient oxidant dangers."
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Mark Mattson, Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, has studied how plant chemicals, or phytochemicals, affect our cells (in test tubes) for years. The assumption in the field has long been that, like vitamins, phytochemicals are directly antioxidant. But Mattson and others think they work indirectly. Much like exercise, he’s found, phytochemicals stress our bodies in a way that leaves us stronger.
Plants, Mattson explains, live a stationary life. They cannot respond to pathogens, parasites, and grazers as we might—by moving. To manage the many threats posed by mobile life, as well as heat, drought, and other environmental stresses, they’ve evolved a remarkable number of defensive chemicals.
Health doesn’t result solely from the instructions your genome contains, but your relationship with the world.
Originally Posted by Pedaling Fool
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