10 Fitness and Nutrition Facts To Know And Tell

Here’s some quick fun facts to consider:

• Proper exercise reduces chronic back pain as well as all other forms of treatment. More importantly, unlike pills or creams, proper exercise prevents further reoccurences of back pain.
• Eating foods with high cholesterol does not cause high cholesterol. This fact will now be considered as part of the ADA’s dietary recommendations. Mainstream nutritionists and their governing bodies have finally caught up with the rest of the nutrition research world.
• 4 out of 5 herbal supplements purchased at big box stores and pharmacies contained NONE of the herbs they claimed to contain. I wonder about the rest of the supplements and vitamins?
• Daily positive self-affirmations increase neural activity in the brain, releasing “feel good” hormones, which then increases the likelihood that you will engage in healthy fitness and nutrition behaviors.
• Yoga breathing deactivates the fight or flight arousal system, putting space between stress and your reaction. Proper breathing also neutralizes negative experiences, and allows you to recover from stress faster.
• Each decade after 35, we lose as much as 5% of our muscle tissue, decreasing our metabolism by up to 450 calories/day. Only strength training offsets this age related metabolic slowdown.
• Those women who work more than 49 hours per week have a 13% higher risk of becoming “high risk” drinkers, defined as a highly excessive intake of 14 or more alcoholic beverages per week.
• Excess flexibility creates a greater risk for injury and pain than too little flexibility.
• Runners who run more than 4 hours/week have the same mortality rate as those who don’t run at all.
• Your daily diet should contain no more than 10% of its calories from sugars. This equates with approximately 9.5 tsp of sugar. American adults actually consume 22 tsp/day, and American children consume 32 tsp/day.  It’s great that we are feeding our kids more sugar than ourselves, more than 3x the top limit recommended.