The 3 Fundamentals for Increasing energy Levels

There are three basic fundamentals, which lie at the base of all health and longevity. Surely, a large part of your health is genetics. In fact, genetics make up more than 60% of what will happen to you health-wise. However, the remaining percentage depends on your eating habits, stress and other factors. Let’s explore them:

Eliminating harmful habits/exposure to toxins

No amount of healthy eating can balance a bad habit like smoking for example – it depletes Vitamin C from the body at a rate, which cannot be kept up with. However, there are harmful substances everywhere and at not so obvious places. For example, if you live in an older home, you can have a variety of  general and unspecific symptoms, all related to exposure to mold spores. The common mold Aspergillus for example is found in most homes, where the humidity levels are high. It’s spores can cause a variety of health problems, including difficulty breathing, poor concentration and much more. Most mold spores are carcinogenic also and therefore – you should do your best to avoid exposure to them.

Exercise

Almost all healthy people who live long and happy lives have one thing in common – they exercise. This may not be the obvious type of exercise, like going to the gym. They might just be an active person overall, and use less transportation, substituting it for walking. Exercise keeps your circulatory system in check, and we know that circulatory and heart conditions sit at the top of death causes. It’s not necessary to be extreme – a 20 minute run several times per week will put you way ahead of most people. Make sure to exercise away from big roads or other polluted areas as this may do you more harm than good – we will talk about this in other articles as well.

Diet

Your diet is more important than most people think. Switching to a good diet may take some time in order to see tangible results, which is why many people disregard the effectiveness of a healthy diet. You don’t have be extreme when it comes to your diet also – excluding soft drinks, bread and MSG-ridden meats from your diet will put you way ahead of most people and you will avoid some of the most obviously harmful toxins. In addition to that, I always recommend taking a good quality multivitamin and fish oil – achieving a 100% RDI of most vitamins is very hard through diet alone. The same applies to fish oil.

Low Fat vs. Low Carb – Which is Better for Lowering Blood Pressure?

A low carb and high fat diet is the base of most successful weight loss programs, including the Atkins diet. The mechanism behind weight gain on a high-carb diet is now pretty clear – eating carbohydrates causes spikes in blood sugar, which releases insulin. As a result, any excess sugar is stored by the body as fat. This mechanism is so effective that you can easily gain 5-10 lbs of fat in a few days and more importantly – quickly undo any progress that you have made. Therefore, it is important not to indulge in carb binges soon after you have successfully lost weight. Regardless, lets look at the differences between a low fat and a low carb diet:

Low fat diets and blood pressure

A low-fat and a high-carbohydrate diet is based on the obsolete theory that fat is bad because it is high in calories. It also causes cholesterol and blood lipid problems. At least that’s what we thought. We now know that fat is the main source of energy for the body, and it makes up nearly 100% of cellular walls. Therefore, a low fat diet is generally speaking not a good idea, unless you are trying to deal with a specific medical condition, which requires it.

Losing weight on a low fat diet is also difficult – in order to do so, you would have to eat very frequent and small carbohydrate-rich meals. Eating anything more than can be stored in your muscles and liver (which is about 800 kcal) will result in a fat gain, especially if you are predisposed to gaining weight (which you probably are, since you are reading this article).

High fat, low carb – does it really cause hypertension?

This is the most effective strategy, when it comes to losing weight. But wait, isn’t fat high in calories? It is. In fact, it has more than twice the calories of carbohydrates per gram. However, there are countless examples that support the fact that caloric intake and weight loss are connected only partially. You can easily lose weight while consuming 3000 kcal per day. You can also keep staying overweight, despite your best efforts to starve yourself. It is all in the source of your calories and not the amount.

But what is the best way to lower your blood pressure? Your diet has a big impact on this, but most of the things you have probably already heard about this are wrong – high fat diets do NOT raise blood pressure on their own. To learn more about how to lower your blood pressure, read this report.

The Importance of Vitamin C

Vitamin C is one of the most commonly taken vitamins. However, there is still a large percentage of people who don’t get enough. Vitamin C is the primary antioxidant in the body and protects it’s cells from free radical damage. In addition to that, it is also used by the body to produce collagen – an elastic substance, which makes more than 50% of your skin and blood vessels.

Long-term effects of a chronic vitamin c deficiency

Many people today are afraid of high cholesterol. Why? Because it leads to heart disease and arteriosclerosis. However, this is not the whole truth. The reason why high cholesterol is suspected to increase the chance of dying from a heart attack is simple – the cholesterol builds up on the walls of your arteries and as a result – a plaque forms. This causes blood vessels to become more and more narrow, until they barely let any blood through.

Vitamin C has a big implication in this – cholesterol doesn’t build up on the arterial walls, just because it is ‘high’. It does so in order to repair a damage in the structure of the wall. One of the most common causes of such damage is a chronic low-level deficiency of vitamin c, which in turn slows down your body’s production of collagen and other several other, vital to the circulatory system organic chemicals.