Heart Health Center

Antioxidants for Exercise

A few years ago, as part of a research study, I performed exercise stress tests on middle-aged male runners. I was impressed with their conditioning, but I noticed that most of them looked older than their ages—with wrinkles on their faces and premature baldness. This disturbed me.

These men were living proof that intense exercise ages, stresses and injures your body's tissues because it creates free radicals. Free radicals are highly reactive molecules produced in your body during normal metabolism. They damage your cells by causing oxidation, like the browning of the flesh of a cut apple exposed to the air.

Normally, your body compensates for this oxidation and repairs its cells. However, intense exercise breaks down muscular tissue and cellular membranes to the point where it can overwhelm your body's natural antioxidant system.

Exercise Always Creates Free Radicals

I'm sure some of you are wondering why I'm telling you this, because most of you are not fanatical runners. However, many of you do jog, bicycle, roller skate, walk, and dance for exercise. I want to caution you that the elevated metabolic rate associated with even these moderate types of exercise also causes elevated levels of free radicals.

Of course, I still highly recommend exercise to protect your heart and overall health. However, since exercise increases the production of free radicals, you need to be aware of what is happening and which antioxidants you should get from your diet and as supplements so that you can get all the benefits of exercise with none of the drawbacks. The risks of not exercising or of exercising too little are far greater than the risks of free radical damage.

Here Are the Simple Steps to Protect Yourself

If you exercise more than 30 minutes a day (which you definitely should), I want you to increase your intake of certain nutrients, especially antioxidants, every day. The best source of antioxidants is your diet. Fruits are especially high in vitamin C and a class of powerful antioxidant compounds called anthocyanins.These compounds also give fruits their red, blue, or purple color, so as you can imagine they're most abundant in red, blue, and purple fruits such as berries and cherries.

In addition, ramp up your exercise protection by taking at least 10–30 mg of CoQ10, 200–400 IU of vitamin E, 300–600 mg of vitamin C, 12,500–25,000 IU of beta carotene, 7.5–15 mg of glutathione, and 125–250 mg of magnesium every day.

You can buy these supplements individually, but it's less expensive to find a high-quality multivitamin and mineral combination that contains them. Please remember that you need adequate amounts of these nutrients as “health insurance” if you’re regularly subjecting yourself to the accelerated metabolism and free radical damage that occurs through exercise.

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