In My Humble Opinion

Exercise four times a week, have an apple-a-day, take vitamins, drink eight cups of water and get eight hours of sleep. These tips, and multiple variations of them, are what health care professionals feed us until they're extracted and “better”ones are developed.


With this constant feed, how are we supposed to keep up on what's really going to help us live to be a hundred?


It's aggravating to dish out a small sum of money on a supposed multi-vitamin power cure, only to find the declared holy treatment of all multi-vitamins on the shelf the next week, hence making your attempt to become healthy obsolete.


With nutritionists either constantly changing variations of health remedies or developing new ones, it's impossible to develop a long-term wellness plan.


What about antioxidants? Well, if you thought those were purely fruitful, think again.


A recent article from The New York Times found that vitamins C and E can have negative effects when used in combination with exercise.


“If you exercise to promote health, you shouldn’t take large amounts of antioxidants,” the article stated. “Antioxidants in general cause certain effects that inhibit otherwise positive effects of exercise, dieting and other interventions.”


Through exercising, reactive oxygen compounds – which destroy tissue – block the positive effects of insulin on the metabolic response, meaning you're not getting as good of a work-out, according to the article.


Wonderful, isn't it? Here you are, making a conscious effort to board the health train, only to find that exercising may have sent you back to the station.


What about the benefits of red wine?


The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism classifies moderate drinking as up to two drinks for men, and one for women and elders per day. That's either one 12-ounce beer, or one five-ounce glass of wine for the latter.


One drank for women per day? If anything, women need to drink more than men and older people should be dipping their nib deeper than both.


Perhaps these studies should be taken with a large grain of salt. If what's “healthy” is to have one glass of wine a night, then I'll wait till the next red-wine study, and stick with my two.


Article used: “Vitamins Found to Curb Exercise Benefits,” The New York Times, 5/11/09.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/health/research/12exer.html?ref=health