How's that for twisted logic? Exercise is actually bad for you. Of course, many people in America will love this news, because it confirms their strategy for longevity: sitting on the couch and watching TV. Now, they are proven correct by this research! Being sedentary will extend your lifespan, at least if you believe these simple-minded researchers.
As I mentioned, they can only handle single-variable equations: X=5, or X=12. They can't handle anything like X+Y=12, because apparently, the Y variable is too complicated for them and it has no place in their research. What is the Y variable that I'm talking about here in terms of exercise, free radicals, and longevity? It's nutrition and antioxidants. If you engage in a lot of physical exercise, yet refuse to supplement your diet with superfoods, antioxidants, or other nutritional supplements, then yes, in fact, you are perhaps creating more oxidative stress than if you did nothing. And this is a common mistake made by many people who engage in various forms of exercise.
It's most common in body builders. Body builders seem to put all the emphasis on the cosmetic effect of building muscle mass, and no emphasis on long-term health. Many of them, it seems, will do anything to add a bit more muscle mass, regardless of what happens to their internal organs, immune system, endocrine system, and so on.
What they need is good nutrition. If you exercise and take nutritional supplements to boost the antioxidant level in your tissues, that you will be far healthier than doing either one alone, and of course you will be enormously healthier than the average person.
So it is this combination that matters -- physical exercise and outstanding nutrition. If you do one without the other, you don't get the same beneficial effect. It's even true if you just take nutritional supplements and neglect exercise, because exercise is what moves blood around your body. If you aren't exercising, you aren't distributing the good nutrition that you're ingesting, and it doesn't reach all the cells in your body. Remember that the health of your total system is a reflection of your health at the cellular level. Therefore, if you want to be healthy as a whole person, and have healthy organs, healthy function, and good longevity, then get your cells healthy. The only way to do that is to eat superfoods, nutritional supplements, take lots of vitamins and minerals, and avoid depleting those substances by refusing to ingest foods and beverages that actually strip your body of nutrition. Those include white flour, added sugars, soft drinks, and so on.
At the same time, you have to keep in mind what level of exercise you are subjecting yourself to. There's no doubting that physical exercise can be quite strenuous on the human body. This is especially true if you engage in strength training. It is, in fact, the aim of strength training -- you want to stress your body so that your body adapts, and the way it adapts is by building additional muscle mass in order to equip you with the physical structures you need to better meet those same stresses in the future. Body building is, in fact, the application of stress adaptive responses in a structured way.
But the mistake in all of this research is leaving out the nutrition factor. They probably performed this experiment on everyday, average Americans, and if so, they got a distorted result, and this is one of the huge problems with much of the so-called scientific research being conducted today. It's actually being conducted on a distorted population, because practically everybody has nutritional deficiencies, is chronically dehydrated, suffers from lack of zinc and magnesium and B vitamins and so on. When you conduct tests on the so-called average American, you're actually conducting tests on diseased people and then drawing conclusions from that. Those conclusions don't support the scientific realities that would emerge if these studies were conducted on healthy people.
Because the more important question to ask in all of this is: how does physical exercise improve longevity and reduce the risk of death, especially when combined with superior nutrition and healthy lifestyle habits? That's the question that matters, and that's the question I've been answering for readers through thousands of articles, reports, and e-books over the last several years. That's the question that really matters. And the answers certainly won't be found in simple-minded research that claims exercise is bad for you.
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