Optimize your Nutrition
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Many of you have indicated that lack of time is one of your main barriers when it comes to your health and performance. This is not surprising - with trying to balance work, family, friends, and other commitments it’s hard to find the time to prioritize your health and wellbeing. One of the aims of these weekly emails is to try and give you simple rules and biohacks you can implement into your lives that require as little mental energy as possible. So this week is dedicated to one of the most confusing topics: nutrition.
These days, we are constantly being bombarded with the latest trend or diet fad. This can lead to a lot of confusion and frustration, resulting in us giving up on trying to eat healthy as the diets are too unrealistic and often contradictory. This is even more difficult if you have allergies or food sensitivities that prevent you from having a lot of foods. So we’d like to give you a simple formula to follow that is applicable for anyone at any age, and regardless of food sensitivity:
Health = Nutrients/Calories.
This means that you should prioritize nutrient-dense food, as opposed to calorie-dense food. You want everything you put into your mouth to be beneficial for your health and performance. If you’re going out of your way to make something, you want to make sure you’re getting the best bang for your buck. Make it count! In addition to good nutrition helping prevent a number of chronic diseases, food has the power to give you energy, help you concentrate during the day, and make you feel awesome! On the other hand, eating poorly can leave you feeling fatigued, irritable, nauseous, and just generally lousy.
So how do we optimize our nutrient-to-calorie ratio? Here are some guidelines:
1. Eat vegetables at each meal and have cut-up vegetables available for snacks at all times. And remember it’s important to mix it up so you get a variety of vitamins and minerals!
2. Have a healthy protein with each meal, such as nuts, seeds, legumes, quinoa, poultry, wild fish, and organic grass-fed meat. Healthy proteins help you concentrate and problem solve throughout the day and keep you feeling full for longer.
3. Make sure your diet contains healthy fats, such as olive oil, avocado, flax, and cold water fatty fish. Healthy fats are also incredibly important for cognitive function as they are essential building blocks for the brain.
4. Stick to complex carbohydrates that are high in fibre, like sweet potatoes, quinoa, berries, legumes, seeds, nuts, and long-grain wild rice. This slows down digestion, preventing a big spike in glucose and insulin.
5. Add in “Superfoods” to your diet. Superfoods are foods with very high vitamin, mineral, nutrient, and anti-oxidant levels that are also low in calories (e.g. vegetables), or if not low in calories then powerfully health enhancing (e.g. certain fruit, nuts, avocado, and coconut). Some examples of superfoods are: leafy greens, small fatty fish, legumes, berries, root vegetables, sprouts, seeds (e.g. chia, flax, hemp), spirulina, pomegranate seeds, and turmeric.
6. Hydrate. We discussed the benefits of water last week. If you missed it, a simple rule to follow is to drink half your body weight (in pounds) in ounces of water each day. Make sure that you drink water first thing in the morning as you become very dehydrated overnight.
7. Use caffeine as a tool not a crutch. If you have a task you need to be mentally alert for, you can choose to have caffeine beforehand. However, limit your caffeine consumption to 200 mg/day and not within 8 hours of going to bed.
8. Avoid processed foods and high-sugar foods like syrups, candy, junk foods, cereal, fruit juice, pop, foods with added sugars, and refined carbohydrates.
9. And finally…occasional treats! If you are on a very strict plan seven days a week, you might get frustrated when you aren’t able to stick to it. This can be discouraging and lead you to relapse into old habits. It’s also important to recognize that, in addition to being fuel, food is meant to be enjoyable and is an important part of social life. Allow yourself a treat once or twice a week. Examples include:
Going out for a nice meal with family or friends
Treating yourself to your favourite dessert
Having a glass of wine to celebrate a friend’s birthday
Simply, have whole, fresh, unprocessed food. Basically food that looks like food. As much as possible try and minimize packaged foods.
What are we finding in the research?
Blueberries are widely regarded as a “superfood”. This is because they are rich in anthocyanins, a class of polyphenols that have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Foods that are high in this micronutrient are thought to have cardiovascular protective effects, at least in part due to improved vascular function. However, this improvement in vascular function might also extend to the brain!
A 2018 study looked at the association between blueberries and brain perfusion in older adults with mild cognitive impairment. The researchers measured cerebral blood flow, by using functional magnetic resonance imaging, to assess brain activation during a working memory task. They found that participants in the blueberry supplementation group had greater brain activation compared to the placebo group. This suggests that in addition to cardiovascular protection, blueberries can enhance cognitive function by increasing blood flow to the brain. So if you’re looking for a brain-boosting food, grab a handful of blueberries!
Click out this link to read the full article!
