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The lowdown on training with nutritional supplements

Whatever you’re into, whether it’s weightlifting, bodybuilding, athletics of whatever sort or just plain keeping fit, there’s a huge, huge and often pretty bewildering range of sports supplements out there that will complement your training routine. But which ones do you really need? From instant whey proteins to amino acids, nitric oxide (Jack3d being a good example of a popular one) there’s loads of stuff out there. If you want to get a good overview about the essentials, then read on…

Find yourself a nutritionist
Because it can be a bit daunting, many people who want to get serious about their fitness regime – it’s not essential that you do, but can be a bit of a minefield for a newbie.

Protein Powders
Found in food like meat, fish, dairy, and soy, pulse and vegetable products, protein is essential for building muscle. The three principal types used in supplements are:

• Whey
• Casein
• Soy

Found in milk, whey protein is arguably the best and most popular of this trio of proteins, because it’s fast-absorbing has the highest value of providing branched-chain amino acids. In this way, instant whey helps build and maintain muscle mass. And not only this, but whey is also an antioxidant, helping to jack the body’s immune system, helping in the fight against regime-ruining illnesses.

There are three principle types of shake you can get:

• Low carb, low-calorie, low fat: perfect for weight loss while maintaining muscle mass
• High protein, high calorie, low fat: perfect for muscle gain
• Medium carbs, medium calories: perfect for a quick and easy meal replacement

Amino Acid Supplements
The essential building blocks of protein (the stuff your muscles are made of), amino acid supplements provide the combination of essential amino acids the body requires to grow and repair itself – and ones that the body simply doesn’t produce itself, and must therefore get from food sources – or supplements. Found in protein-rich sources such as meat, fish, dairy, soy, vegetable, pulse and grain products, athletes also commonly complement their intake with supplements.

Nitric Oxide
Necessary for intercellular communication, nitric oxide is made by the body and is required for all physiological processes that take place inside the human body, enhancing blood flow to the furthest corners of the body. This is therefore a really important supplement for those who want to build muscle.

N.B.
It’s entirely possible to overdose with NO2 and common side effects can include (but are by no means limited to) weakness, diarrhoea and nausea. You find out your optimum level by “tolerance mapping”, whereby you take a small dosage for one week, recording the associated benefits and side effects, and continue raising the dosage over a number of weeks until the optimum level is reached – which, if course, will have you seeing the most benefits with the least amount of side effects.

Fall is a good time to get fit

Many of us fall into the same patterns. With summer on the horizon, we start working out in May with the hope we will look good in our swimsuits. Late in the year, the holidays come around, you eat too much at all the parties, and then you wake up on January 2nd looking and feeling bad again.

It’s time to break that cycle. This year, try to be proactive by committing to working out and eating right during the fall and into the holidays. The gyms will be less crowded, and it’s a great time to develop good habits that will stay with you through the year.

Think about starting some new exercises. If you haven’t been doing weight training, then maybe this is a good time to start.

Also, if you’re going to try something like more weight training, then take a look at protein powder and creatine. These are important supplements if you’re serious about building muscle, but keep in mind that overall nutrition and eating habits are equally important. These items should supplement your diet. Do your research and consult your doctor or a nutritionist, but things like whey protein are very popular with people looking to get in shape and look fit.

It’s also a great time to focus on cardio. Many people lose sight of this as the weather gets bad. They stay inside and get less exercise. Now is the time to be consistent and get your cardio in the gym. Find out what works best for you – the bike, treadmill or other machines.

Good luck, and you’ll feel better after those holiday dinners!

Bottled water – Do you know what you’re drinking?

Where is the bottled water you’re drinking come from?

Has it been tested for contaminants, and has it been purified?

Has it purified?

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) decided to find the answers to the above basic questions. According to the EWG, nine out of the top ten best-selling brands of bottled water fail to provide answers to all three. Only one of the 173 bottled water products surveyed, Nestlé’s Pure Life Purified Water, discloses this information right on the label, and provides information for requesting a water quality test report. 18 percent of bottled waters do not tell you where their water comes from, and 32 percent do not disclose anything about the treatment or the purity of the water.

In all, only three bottled water products received a good rating for transparency from the EWG:

  • *Nestlé’s Pure Life Purified Water
  • *Gerber Pure Purified Water
  • *Penta Ultra-Purified Water

Why are these companies so secretive about the water their selling? Could it be the ridiculous price they charge for what many brands of bottled water amount to, tap water?

To see the full report go HERE.

BEWARE: Big pharm and big brother want to take over the supplement industry

Our government, which is getting bigger and bigger, is continually trying to take away the rights of us citizens. Being consistent, the government has taken hold of several industries over the last few years to no benefit, and is now set its sights on the supplement industry. The FDA, a sheep in wolves clothing, is claiming they’re interest in taking over the supplement industry is public safety. However, government statistics show that supplements are basically benign, especially when compared to prescription drugs. Not to mention the outstanding natural health benefits associated with supplement intake.

If the government gets their way, they and the pharmaceutical industry know the supplement industry companies won’t be able to afford the FDA’s drug trial process. Most supplement companies will go out of business if supplements, which includes vitamins, are treated as drugs under the new regulations; drug companies like Merk, Pfizer and others will step in and take over.

Drug companies are not in the business of building health. It is in their best interest to have as many unhealthy people as possible. Its so important that big pharma spends more money on ads than it does on research (twice as much). It’s a marketing driven industry, trying to convince people they have an affliction and the drug companies have the answer.

Is it any wonder why there have been so many drug recalls associated with so many deaths. Perhaps if big pharma spent more on research, and the FDA did their job, many people wouldn’t have lost their lives needlessly. And this is who we’re supposed to put our trust in running our supplement industry?

Taken from Mercola.com:

Dietary Supplement Labeling Act of 2011, introduced at the end of June by U.S. Senator Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) is trying to treat vitamins as if they are drugs, allegedly to “improve the safety of dietary supplements,” which implies that supplements must be a major safety hazard to begin with. Durbin’s bill goes hand-in-hand with new FDA regulations that amend the definitions for new dietary ingredients (NDI’s), and together, they can threaten your health and freedom of choice, and further serve to strengthen the fatally flawed paradigm of health and medicine.

An estimated 106,000 hospitalized patients die each year from drugs that, by medical standards, are properly prescribed and administered, and an estimated two million more suffer serious side effects.

How does the safety of supplements compare?

In 2001, 84.6 percent of all substances implicated in fatal poisonings were pharmaceutical drugs, according to that year’s American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC) report. This compares with 0.8 percent for all dietary supplements combined, even including substances such as dinitrophenol, a dangerous (and illegal) substance banned in 1938, as well as the central nervous system stimulant Ma Huang (Ephedra). ONE drug alone, the anti-asthma drug theophylline, which was responsible for 15 deaths that year, amounted to 66 percent more than all the available dietary supplements combined.

According to CDC mortality data for 2005, prescription drugs killed more than 33,500 people that year, second only to car accidents. That same year, the American Association of Poison Control Centers reported 27 deaths that were associated with dietary supplements

Legal DRUGS are killing massive numbers of people, not vitamins and supplements. Unfortunately, one reason for all these drug deaths could be the lax way the FDA “regulates” the drug industry by not requiring that all serious events in a trial be made public:

“When a clinical trial that is undertaken by drug companies shows that a drug has serious side effects, there is no law that says that study has to be published or made public in any way,” Dr. Dean says in her book.

Vioxx is a perfect example of a product that was approved without having published all the clinical studies where serious events that resulted in the deaths of over 60,000 people were discovered.

What’s obvious is that the number of people taking supplements and vitamins is continuously growing. It’s a $60-billion-a-year industry, and the drug industry wants a piece of that pie, as evidenced by drug giant Pfizer, which recently announced that it’s going into the supplement business to counter some of the losses from its blockbusters that are soon going off-patent. The FDA is apparently on-track to protect its client’s vitamin and supplement interests by proposing the new policy it slipped in just before July 4.

What can you do? Go HERE and get involved.

In a previous Q&A I discuss food and hypothyroidism

Hypothyroidism can be caused by a variety of things. In this country, diet is the main culprit. Our food supply is so deficient in nutrients and loaded with anti-nutrients that it’s really no surprise we are experiencing health problems in epidemic proportions. Vegetable oils (polyunsaturated fats) are a huge contributor to hypothyroidism, obesity, cardio vascular disease and other health problems. These are man-made foods that have only been around since the early 1900s, with soy oil becoming the number one cooking oil by the 1950s.

Soy products, like soy oil and protein, contain extremely high amounts of goitrogens. Goitrogens are naturally occurring substances that interfere with the normal function of the thyroid gland by blocking the synthesis of thyroid hormones and slowing ones metabolism. Before inexpensive polyunsaturated fats became common place, beef tallow, lard, olive oil and tropical oils were in use; heart disease, hypothyroidism, obesity, diabetes and other diseases were but a fraction of the incidence they are today.

Read the rest HERE.

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