This is where the importance of antioxidants to athletes comes in to help combat oxidative stress and to provide oxidative stress relief.

Antioxidants help protect your cells from free radicals and oxidative stress. Free radicals (atoms with at least one unpaired electron) can damage your cells and DNA, sometimes even to the point of causing cellular death. Your cells produce free radicals when they make energy, so heavy exercise usually increases their production, because your body needs more energy. Free radicals, and as a result, oxidative stress, can also be produced by things like environmental pollution, eating fried foods, being stressed out, and cigarette smoke.

Antioxidants scavenge these free radicals, stopping them from doing their damage (by providing a pair for the unpaired electrons) thus resulting in oxidative stress relief. But, not all antioxidants are created equal – some are stronger than others, meaning they’re able to neutralize far more free radicals and deal with oxidative stress more efficiently than their counterparts. The strongest anti-oxidants are actually produced by you, within your cells – they are SOD (super oxide dismutase) and GSH (glutathione in its reduced form). These are hundreds of times stronger than anything found in fruits or vegetables, but after about age 20, our bodies produce less and less. This means cells are more vulnerable to attack and destruction from oxidative stress. GSH-Ignite helps to increase both SOD and GSH levels naturally and efficiently support oxidative stress relief.

The other important factor in fighting free radicals is making sure that those antioxidants can move effectively through your body so they can do the work they were designed to do. Protein Extreme Energy does just this, providing not only a supplement rich in antioxidants, but also helping to establish a recognizable, transferable electron process.

Antioxidants and combating oxidative stress should be on the top of every serious athlete’s list to help support faster recovery times, and reduce muscle loss and inflammation.

Copyright 2010 Elite Sports and Fitness

• promote longevity
• protect the body from heart disease
• prevent diabetes
• neutralize arthritis
• help to treat asthma and bronchitis
• reduce the effects of psoriasis
• reduce chronic fatigue syndrome and lupus
• boost the immune system

There are over 80,000 medical articles discussing glutathione.  Glutathione is your body’s master regulator of each cell.

Glutathione is produced naturally in your body and is a combination three building blocks of amino acids – cysteine, glutamine, and glycine.

Why You Need Glutathione

Glutathione is absolutely necessary for everyone to maintain a healthy immune system. Every major system in the body is affected by glutathione as it circulates through the body removing waste products and toxins while also giving energy a boost. When your body has high amounts of glutathione, it’s able to fight off minor illnesses quickly while keeping up your energy and alertness.

Glutathione is the primary antioxidant in your body. As free radicals and other dangers get passed from one place to another, they eventually wind up with the glutathione which helps to break the free radicals down and recycle them. Troubles begin to mount when the number of toxins is greater than the amount of glutathione in your system.

Without high amounts of glutathione, the body is hugely susceptible to the dangerous toxins and illness pervades. The lowest levels of glutathione have been found in the sickest members of our oldest generation. Time, exposure to the elements and natural aging effects decrease these levels, and if this continues unchecked, it can have a devastating impact on overall health.

Where Do These Toxins Come From?

For the first few thousands of years humans existed, the primitive glutathione system was able to handle any of the dangerous substances that found their way into the body. In just the last few decades, humans have begun a diet of processed, unhealthy foods and live in an area polluted with any number of toxins in the water we drink and the air we breathe. Many of us have been exposed to heavy metals and might have mercury fillings in our teeth. Thanks to our current diet and living conditions, it’s estimated that half of the population is lacking sufficient glutathione levels. They can’t fight off these toxins.

What Happens to Your Glutathione Levels

Glutathione levels can drop as much as 35% thanks to aging, physical stress and exercise. As glutathione is so closely linked to the body’s energy, this decrease in glutathione causes an energy decrease as well as the remaining glutathione is used for more critical jobs. The remaining glutathione is needed to fight off free radicals to prevent waste from building up, preventing the body’s cells from working properly, and the body’s cells don’t absorb vital nutrients. In this catabolic state, the body begins to break down.

Glutathione in Your Diet

It’s important to support the glutathione levels in the body, but it’s not obvious how to build up stores. Glutathione is produced by the body’s cells. To raise levels of glutathione, you must stimulate the body to produce it. This is done by consuming the building blocks of glutathione through some vitamins and nutritional supplements.  The best way to ensure the body has sufficient glutathione levels is through the consumption of direct glutathione supplements, such as GSH Ignite .

Supplements that lead to increases in glutathione are beneficial for everyone. Even individuals in good health can prevent future diseases and health concerns by raising glutathione levels. Young people especially can benefit by taking glutathione supplements as there will be greater health benefits over time as free radicals are constantly prevented from causing harm over years. However, while healthy adults benefit from glutathione supplements, those who are suffering from a medical condition have a more dramatic reaction to the antioxidant. Glutathione has created impressive results in regard to AIDS, Parkinson’s disease and cancer. High glutathione levels actually allow the body to heal itself.

The body produces glutathione, so taking a glutathione supplement to lead to this production does not create side effects or any dangers. Even healthy individuals lose glutathione stores as the body works to fight off the mercury, cigarette smoke and countless other toxins in the air. Supplements at any level of health are beneficial as you might be actively working to prevent diseases thought to be caused by aging, but truly caused by expose to free radicals over time.

Copyright 2010 LifeHealthSecrets

Antioxidants

Free radicals are small oxygenated molecules that possess an unpaired electron. In molecules, electrons generally go around in pairs and if an electron had no buddy then it desperately tries to find one. So desperately, in fact, that as soon as they are born they will steal one from the nearest donor they can find. In some cases that will be a skin cell, in others a low density lipid (LDL) molecule, and in yet others, DNA and proteins such as muscle tissue will be destroyed.

In each case, the molecules robbed of an electron are altered in some way or, as inferred above, even destroyed.  Thus, the membranes of skin cells are ruptured, causing the appearance of premature aging.  LDL molecules are rendered water-insoluble, so that they and the cholesterol they carry are deposited on the walls of your arteries causing atherosclerosis, and muscle cells are destroyed causing weakness and lack of athletic performance.

Free radicals are formed by exposure to pollution such as pesticides, tobacco smoke, industrial and traffic fumes and strong sunlight.  They are also formed during your body’s metabolism, and the more you exercise the more free radicals are generated.

Antioxidants destroy free radicals as soon as they are formed, and so prevent this undesirable oxidative stress taking place. Common antioxidants include Vitamins A, C and E, flavanoids, beta-carotene and many other forms of plant chemicals (phytochemicals). They can be used by athletes to prevent oxidative damage cause by the free radicals that are generated in the body during strenuous exercise.

Anti-Inflammatories

The immune system works in many ways to protect your body from invasion by pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, fungi and other foreign intruders. Part of your immune system is known as the inflammatory response, which occurs particularly when parts of your body suffer damage or become infected.

For example, arthritis is an inflammatory condition that occurs as a result of damage to bone tissue or cartilage, and subsequent infection of the synovial fluid. Another is the fever associated with serious bacterial and viral infections. Your body reacts to these situations by producing prostaglandins, opening up the blood vessels to allow the white blood cells to get to the source of the infection, thus causing swelling. They also increase the body temperature to render it less comfortable for bacteria and viruses, and produce chemicals such as cytokines that can call on the larger macrophages of the blood to the infected site.

The increase in the blood vessel size causes painful swelling while the temperature increase can lead to fever.  Some anti-inflammatories work by inhibiting the enzymes, mainly Cox-1 and Cox-2, that are responsible for prostaglandin production.  Inflammation reduces and the pain and swelling are relieved. These are the NSAIDs (non steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) such as aspirin and ibuprofen. Others operate in a different way, but with the same end result.

Importance to Athletes

No Pain, No Gain – so they say. The trouble is that with pain you cannot gain. Pain caused through injuries is mainly caused by inflammation. Muscle degradation is caused by free radical oxidation, the free radicals being generated by extreme muscular exercise and metabolic activity.

Athletes and runners, who are particularly prone to free radical-induced oxidative stress and to inflammation of joints and muscles, require treatment that does not involve NSAIDs. It has been reported that some athletes using Advil, or ibuprofen, suffered more inflammation that those that did not1.  NSAIDs block the production of inflammatory prostaglandins, but also block a prostaglandin that protects the lining of the stomach and this can lead to internal bleeding.

They also reduce blood clotting, which results in increased general bleeding and bruising from injuries. For athletes, therefore, natural anti-inflammatories such as turmeric, papain(2), cocoa flavanols(3) (possibly) and trimethyl glycine(4) are preferred.  They work in various ways, including reducing prostaglandin production, although are much kinder to your body.

Reducing Inflammation

It is essential that free radical oxidative stress and inflammation be reduced to a minimum, not only to enable rapid recovery after exercise, and also after injury, but also to allow metabolic rates to increase without a corresponding increase in free radical damage to the cardiovascular system and muscle tissue.

The use of NSAIDs is commonplace, but, as explained, can cause several side effects if taken regularly. The safest method is by means of natural anti-inflammatories and antioxidants, some of which have been mentioned above though this is by no means an exhaustive list.

References

1.  Reported in http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/phys-ed-does-ibuprofen-help-or-hurt-during-exercise/

2.  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11589110

3.  J Cardiovasc Pharmacol. 2006;47 Suppl 2:S163-71; discussion S172-6.

4.  http://www.arthritis-treatment-and-relief.com/supplements-that-help-ease-muscle-and-joint-pain.html

5.  http://arthritis.emedtv.com/diclofenac/diclofenac-risks.html

Copyright 2010 LifeHealthSecrets

Copywrite 2009 LifeHealthSecrets

Understanding the oxidative system will provide us with the first method for increasing cellular energy. For cellular respiration to occur, oxygen must be drawn into the cells, where it’s used to produce energy (if you want to get specific, the mitochondria in our cells use it as a hydrogen acceptor during ATP production to produce water). How is oxygen drawn into the cell? One means is through the sodium potassium pump, which is what creates a cell’s ‘electrical charge’. The electrons around the outer membrane and inner nucleus of the cell, going in opposite directions, draw in the oxygen by means of diffusion.  So, a cell’s electrical charge controls the amount of oxygen that can be drawn in, and is in part responsible for how much energy your cells can produce.

This provides us with the first method of increasing cellular energy: increase a cell’s electrical charge. Note that electrical charge is also responsible for the removal of metabolic waste from the cell. If a cell’s charge is low, then metabolic waste accumulates and hinders cellular respiration. If things slow down enough, edema or water retention occurs – the cell’s osmotic pressure become so weak that it loses the ability to expel waste and old body fluids. When a cell’s charge is strengthened, metabolic wastes can be properly disposed of and cellular respiration increased.

The second method for increasing cellular energy can be understood through the reductive system. While oxygen is vital to cellular respiration, it also ‘oxidizes’ the cells, producing harmful free radicals that can damage cell function, respiration and DNA.  Reductive enzymes – with glutathione being the main SOD reductive enzyme – are what protect the cell from these free radicals. When a cell doesn’t have enough glutathione, it attempts to decrease ATP production so as to minimize the free radical damage. Therefore, increasing glutathione provides us with the second method to increase cellular energy. By increasing glutathione, you balance oxidation with reduction, and allow ATP to increase creating ATP energy, thereby increasing your body’s cellular energy.

A thorough understanding of these two approaches to increasing cellular energy leads to understanding how two of Life Health Secrets’ supplements work. Protein Extreme Energy functions to increase cellular electron loads and therefore cellular charge – it adopts the first method for increasing cellular energy. GSH-Ignite adopts the second method – by encouraging healthy glutathione levels it allows ATP production to increase. As such, Protein Extreme Energy and GSH-Ignite take complementary routes to achieving the same goal – enhanced cellular respiration, leading to enhanced whole body energy for life.

Copyright 2009 LifeHealthSecrets