Nutrition for Athletic Health
By Dr. Jeff Schutt
Most athletes are very interested in any nutritional program or supplement that will
enhance their performance. Most people relate sports nutrition to building muscle and the
majority of sports nutrition companies cater to this thinking. Check out of the ads in the
muscle magazines at the grocery and book stores. I love to look through them to see what
the latest craze is. Usually it is just the same old thing written in different format. Take
this to gain muscle with a bunch of pseudo science to try to convince the readers their
product is good. We call this the microwave approach to becoming an athlete. Just like
food in a microwave, it may get warmed up but it is not quite as good for you as
conventionally cooked food. A microwave athlete takes the short cuts to get fast results,
sometimes at the expense of true health.
The first thing to look at for a nutritional approach is health first. You can be the
strongest and fastest athlete in the world but if you are sick, break bones, have trouble
breathing, constantly pulling muscles all the time, then how much are you hitting your
full potential anyway. Super strenuous exercise can actually be harmful to the body if
your nutritional program is not good enough to compensate for working at that level.
Strenuous exercise can actually break the cells of the body down and start a chain
reaction called free radical formation that can lead to degenerative conditions including
cancer. Athletes should be the healthiest people on earth but I can name several examples
of famous athletes who have had cancer, liver, kidney and joint disease which cut their
careers and lives short. Yet without exercise, our bodies fail even faster. So what are
athletes supposed to do?
Before I will give you some advice on how to protect your body from the harmful
effects of strenuous exercise, let me explain exactly how strenuous exercise can cause
harm to the body. Exercise can increase oxygen utilization from 10 to 20 times over the
resting state. This greatly increases the generation of free radicals, prompting concern
about enhanced damage to muscles and other tissues. Free radicals are atoms with an unpaired electron. This makes them unstable and highly reactive. To regain their balance
they steal electrons from other atoms causing them to become unstable in a chain
reaction. Nature provides a way to counteract this process. Anti-oxidants are compounds
which neutralize free radicals or prevents free radical initiated chemical reactions. Antioxidants have spare electrons that they can give up without becoming unstable.
In his book Optimum Sports Nutrition, Dr. Michael Colgan describes how exercise
injures muscle by the following paragraphs.
Muscle power is generated by conversion of the chemical energy of a compound in
your muscle cells called adenonsine triphosphate (ATP), to the mechanical force of
muscle contraction. But your store of ATP is very limited. During exercise it must be
regenerated continuously. The principle way your body does this, is by conversion of
muscle stores of fat and sugar (glycogen).
The conversions of fat and sugar to energy occur by oxidations. Pairs of hydrogen
atoms (H2) fire off from the fat and sugar like guided missiles, and hit the oxygen from
your blood (O) to form water (H2O). For 95% of your oxygen consumption, the
conversion is pretty clean, and does not produce many free radicals.
The scientific gobbledegook for this process is the tetravalent reduction of oxygen with
cytochrome C oxidase. That is the energy production process explained in all college
biochemistry texts. But many of the texts leave out the second chemical pathway by
which muscles use oxygen, which explains why a lot of sports physicians and
nutritionists know nothing about it.
Though it involves only 5% of your oxygen use, this recently discovered univalent
reduction pathway is very dirty. That is, every time you exercise, it produces millions of
superoxide free radicals, hydroperoxides and hydroxyl free radicals. These act like
shrapnel, damaging every muscle cell they contact. The damage they cause is a major
source of the continued muscle soreness and weakness you feel for days after heavy
exercise. The text Oxy-radicals in Molecular Biology and Pathology can help explain
this.
Whenever you push your training, the scenario gets worse. Athletes in top gear use 12
to 20 times the oxygen of sedentary folk. That’s a ton of free radical potential. It is not
known how much their extra use of oxygen increases free radicals in athletes, but tests on
animals gives us a pretty good idea. In 1989, in some of the first direct measurements, Dr.
Alexandre Quintanilha and colleagues ran rats on a treadmill for progressively longer
periods. In a few weeks the rats could run for two hours nonstop every day. They were
run at only 0.9 miles per hour, which is a jog for a rat. Once trained they did not appear
too distressed by the exercise. But measurements showed a three-fold increase in muscle
free radicals during exercise. And autopsies showed extensive muscle damage.
The sheer volume of oxygen you use is not the only reason that exercise overwhelms
your muscles with free radicals. The vital chemical cytochrome C also gets used up.
Cytochrome C oxidase is the last catalyst in the chain that regenerates ATP, so your
muscles can continue working. With any intensity of exercise, cytochrome C activity can
drop by 50% or more.
The problem is that there is no scientific evidence that taking cytochrome C orally can
elevate its levels. When cytochrome C activity falls, another nutrient coenzyme Q
(COQ), comes to the rescue. You need high muscle levels of CoQ if you want to excel.
Elite athletes show much higher levels than sedentary people. Long intense, training
programs raise muscle CoQ levels. The good news is that you can take a short cut by
supplementing with CoQ. Dr. Karl Folkers and colleagues at the University of Texas
have shown that oral supplements of CoQ can easily increase muscle levels and more
importantly performance.
In collaborative studies with Dr. Folkers at the Free University of Brussels, Dr. J. Van
Fraechem gave a group of healthy, young men 60 mg of CoQ per day for 8 weeks. They
did not change their usual level of daily exercise which was fairly minimal. Without any
change in exercise, their maximum exercise capacity increased 28%.
CoQ levels decline rapidly with age after 25 years. So for its multiple essential
functions in athletic performance, the Colgan Institute uses daily supplements of 3060mg of CoQ10 in all sports formulas.
The free radical attack caused by exercise doesn’t stop when you stop. The hydroxy
radicals especially (made from busting up your body water), continue to injure you long
afterwards. It works like this. Hydroxy radicals react with fats inside your muscle cell
membranes to make them go rancid, a process called lipid peroxidation. This creates
havoc for cell processes, leading to much pain and inflammation.
The rancid fats themselves then become free radicals called peroxylradicals, which in
turn do more damage and spawn further radicals. With every bout of intense exercise,
you literally get an inflammatory chain reaction that lasts up to 20 hours.
The combined muscle damage caused by the free radicals produced during exercise,
plus the hydroxyl radical chain reaction after exercise, is not the end of the story. The
damage itself initiates another free radical sequence that goes on for days. It happens this
way. As with any bodily injury, as soon as free radical damage occurs, your immune
system becomes active to combat it. The ground troops of the immune system, called
neutrophils, move in to mop up the dead and dying muscle cells. But in doing so, they
release masses of free radicals themselves, which cause further damage. The net result of
this free radical circus, is that any bout of intense exercise, leaves you stiff and sore and
unable to exercise properly for up to five days. If you do force yourself, and continue to
push it, then your risk of more serious injury goes through the roof.
Many athletes spend years negotiating their way around free radical damage. If they
work too hard, then training is set back by repeated injury. And the cells they kill cause
losses of muscle and strength. But if they don’t work hard enough, the muscles are not
sufficiently stimulated, and they make no gains, or even lose because of atrophy.
The main areas of muscle cells protected from free radicals by glutathione are the
surfaces of the cell membranes. But inside the fatty membranes, where the lipid
peroxidation chain reaction occurs, fat soluble vitamin E is champ. Vitamin E breaks the
chain reaction, by absorbing the free radicals to form what are called tocopherol radicals
and tocopheroxyl radicals.
Breaking the chain reaction quickly uses up your store of vitamin E, leaving it to clog
the membranes. Vitamin C then enters the picture. Dr. Al Tappel, at the University of
California, Davis, showed over 20 years ago that vitamin C neutralizes the tocopheroxyl
radicals and regenerates the vitamin E again, allowing it to return to the fight. This cycle
uses up vitamin C rapidly so better have an ample supply, if you are getting into serious
exercise.
The mineral selenium also assists in the fight. Selenium helps both glutathione and
vitamin E. It forms what is called the active site where glutathione destroys lipid peroxide
radicals. It also acts synergistically with vitamin E to improve its free radical killing
efficiency. To do an effective antioxidant job you need adequate supplies of all these
nutrients, glutathione, vitamin E, vitamin C and selenium.
Some variables that can help you design a personal program are: duration of training,
intensity of training, bodyfat, age and size. The longer you train per session, the more
antioxidants you need. The more intense the training, the more antioxidants you need.
The higher your bodyfat, above 10% for males and 15% for females, the more you need.
The older you are above 30, the more you need. And the bigger you are, the more you
need. Other more complex variables for individuals are blood test analysis, type and
phase of training, medical history, and level of environmental pollution in the athlete’s
home area. Usually an athlete is started at the low end. If an athlete has not uses
antioxidants before, or has stopped using them more than three months previously, then
his system has to adjust numerous enzyme counts in order to deal with them. This
adjustment takes around three months. Even after adjustment is complete, antioxidants
should always be taken in divided doses, and always with food. To jump in with high
levels of antioxidants from the first day, is a great way to an upset gut and expensive and
uncomfortable urine.
As you can see from Dr. Colgan’s book, it becomes a tricky process to fully monitor
the body and make sure that it is protected from free radical damage. Most people simply
give up on exercise but the side effects of inactivity are much worse than exercise. I will
save that discussion for another day.
So we know our bodies make free radicals, but they cannot make anti-oxidants, so we
have to consume anti-oxidant rich foods or supplements. Athletes should start with this
fundamental health concept before jumping into taking the sports enhancement
supplements which can further promote more free radical damage with quick growing
muscle. Once the athletes have a good health foundation, then the other may be
appropriate. The daily foods that are rich in anti-oxidants are the bright colored fruits and
vegetables. The darker the green the better and the brighter the orange and yellow the
better. It is recommended that an average person eat 9 servings of fruits and vegetables
per day and athletes should have even a little more. Unfortunately, that does not happen. I
recommend that athletes take the USANA multivitamin and anti-oxidant regime called
the Essentials. They are scientifically designed to keep the cells of the body healthy.
USANA also has formulations for young children and teenagers so athletes of any age
can be protected. USANA products are pharmaceutical grade and they are even listed in
the physician’s desk reference. They are guaranteed to be potent and free from any
banned substances and impurities.
By having our athletes try to eat a good diet of proper foods that are rich in antioxidants and back that up with nutritional supplements for athletic health, we can take
their performance to another level.