Here’s another interesting article about some differences between healthy food and supplements. I think the gist is that vitamins aren’t well understood and eating a variety of plants is healthy.
Vitamins were strongly antioxidant in test tubes. So the ROS theory of aging and disease rose to prominence. You could slow aging, it followed, by neutralizing free radicals with antioxidant pills. A supplement industry now worth $23 billion yearly in the U.S. took root.
But if those ROS were so harmful, some scientists asked—and the basic design of our (eukaryote) cells was over 1 billion years old—why hadn’t evolution solved the ROS problem? At the same time, scientists began finding that exercise and calorie restriction increased lifespan in animals. Both elevated ROS. According to the ROS model of aging, animals that exercised and fasted should have died younger. But they lived longer.
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 before 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.
In his experiment, Ristow saw that vitamin supplements interrupted this sequence of stress followed by fortification, probably because they neutralized the ROS signal before it could be “heard” elsewhere in the cell. By interfering in the adaptive response, vitamins prevented the strengthening that would have otherwise followed the stress of physical exertion. Antioxidant supplementation paradoxically left you weaker.
Another viewpoint:
While xenohormesis is a compelling idea, it remains unproven. Barry Halliwell, a biochemist at the National University of Singapore, and an expert on antioxidants, has seen the dietary fads, from vitamins to fiber, come and go. He says the hormetic and xenohormetic ideas are plausible, but not certain. Various studies suggest that people who consume a lot of fruits and vegetables have healthier lifestyles generally. Those people probably go easy on the junk food, which alone may improve health.
Another view on the toxicity of “healthy food” is a book called The Plant Paradox. It is unfortunately not without a lot of controversy, yet I personally have benefited from following the protocols.
People are different in many ways. When the protocols from the book don’t harm you, then there is no reason to stop following them!
I like to eat plant-based meals with lots of legumes, vegetables and whole grains. Hence I was curious when I heard about ‘The Plant Paradox’ for the first time. A quick internet search led me to this video:
The founder of the site promotes plant based nutrition. Yet the facts presented are quite interesting. Please take a look at the video, it’s just five minutes long.
I’m not trying to promote the book or the author. Everything I say is from my personal experience.
I’ll summarize what I meant by:
I have been diagnosed with IBS. My doctor recommended that I visit a local dietician. The dietician and I experimented with lots of different combinations of food. Nothing worked.
I found the video on YouTube late last year. Bought the book. Read it. Started following some of the protocols. I felt better after the second meal.
Let me say that again. I felt better after the second meal. Now please remember, I’ve been with the dietician for more than a year.
What I found was that “healthy” food like my morning bowl of muesli, the cucumbers and tomatoes in my salad affected my body negatively. I stopped eating muesli. I peel and deseed my cucumbers and tomatoes. I made some other changes as well, but those were the big ones.
I’ve always been a “healthy eater”, I just take more care now when I prepare my food.
I bought that book because I suffered from something that was directly addressed in the book ie food negatively affected me.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results
Fat guy walks into the dietician’s office “this diet is not for me!”, dietician replied “yeah you are right, it’s for thin people.”
@LourensP That’s totally fine. As I said, people are different. What’s healthy for one person can be detrimental for another one and vice versa. It was good luck that you discovered these protocols. I just don’t like this trend of saying ‘This is bad for some people, so it’s bad for all people’. This conclusion would need solid scientific evidence in my opinion.
I understand that it can be annoying when so-called healthy foods cause you problems while so many people talk about eating them and maybe also benefit from them. Fortunately food is only one part of a healthy life. There’s so much more one can do, for instance regular sleep, good hydration, fitness, mental exercise, friends and a happy relationship.
