The Healthy Blogger

Exercise and antioxidants

An interesting health article today discussed vitamins and exercise.  Though experts are always urging us to eat a well-balanced diet in order to receive all our daily nutrients without the use of supplements, it is not an easy task.  I know people who eat healthy, but I really don’t know anyone who eats everything that is recommended in order to get all their vitamins and minerals.  Most of us are set in our ways as far as diet is concerned, with very little variation in our meals.  When the diet consists of the same thing day after day, it is likely that many nutrients are missing and many others are in excess.

I had never heard of people taking vitamins, especially C and E, after exercising in order to reduce what’s called “oxidative stress”.  This oxidative stress is created by harmful chemicals, called “free radicals”, which are released when we exercise.  Free radicals are believed to cause cancer and heart disease, amongst other things.  Vitamins C and E are antioxidants, which block these free radicals and protect the body from its damage.  Interesting, logical concepts, though I had never heard about doing this.

But scientists have now found that antioxidants after exercising may not be good.  Apparently, these free radicals can reduce the risk of diabetes by increasing insulin sensitivity.  Most diabetes caused by obesity is related to insulin insentivity.  That is, the body cannot respond to insulin, so the blood sugars remain elevated.  Muscles, when they respond to insulin, take glucose up and use that as energy.  When they don’t respond, the muscles have to use other sources of energy.  Antioxidants block these good effects of free radicals.

As always in health, there is a delicate balance that needs to be preserved.  Vitamins are good, but they should not be taken in excess.  The study highlights some negative effects of vitamins, but it only talked about vitamins taken after exercising.  There was no comment about its effects if taken at other times.  Will it help protect against free radicals in cancer and heart disease or harmful in diabetes?  Also, it did not discuss threshold levels that can help or harm.

Call for consistency in food labelling

I have noticed the lack of consistency in food labels in the UK.  It is very confusing, even to someone like me, who is educated.  Despite education, most of us do not know what to make of the numbers listed.  Is it percentage of RDA/GDA? Or is it percentage of the entire portion?  Of course, they usually report per serving, but they do not always report in terms of percentages.  And most people are not aware of their daily allowances for fats, salts, sugars, etc.  Then there’s the colour-coding system, where green is good, amber is acceptable and red is bad.  Child-friendly, but it might not give you the actual numbers.

One of the reasons for the lack of consistency is that there are so many systems.  In addition, the EU will be deciding what they want for labelling of foods across the EU.  The UK has not decided on any one system, so retailers are using whatever they please.  In addition, individual product makers can put their own system on the packaging.

The other thing I have found is that the focus is on fats, saturated fats, calories, sugars and sodium.  But you can never find any other nutritional information such as any vitamins and minerals contained in the food.  Are we somehow supposed to know that?  In the US, part of the RDA system will list all the nutritional values for the main vitamins and minerals.  Some foods may be high in certain vitamins and the makers would like to point that out.  Is it because most UK residents like to take a multivitamin, so they don’t care about the vitamin content in their foods?  I find the vitamin and mineral content useful.

Though rare, I also have found that some packaging does not even label all the ingredients of the products.  This can be dangerous for someone who might have an unusual allergy.

The government is calling for a single system to be used in reporting the nutritional values on package labelling.  It is a start to some consistency, but I think they’ll need to expand on the information presented.