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Over eating, eating the wrong sort of foods, and not exercising enough increases free radical production and puts our body in a state of oxidative stress.
Oxidative stress is associated with a number of serious health conditions. If we eat a balanced healthy diet, watch our portion sizes and do at least 150 minutes a week of moderate-to-vigorous exercise we can decrease free radical production and increase our body’s manufacture of natural antioxidants such as Coenzyme Q10, reducing oxidative stress
If you want to live to 100, start by looking at what you eat and how you exercise. Almost everything we put in our body undergoes some sort of transformation inside us. It is up to us to make sure that what we put in our mouths is not in excess or detrimental.
Unfortunately, many of us eat way too much. Worldwide Just over 200 million men and slightly less than 300 million women are obese. Excess weight increases your health risks. Too much fat clogs vital cellular processes, increasing production of waste products such as free radicals and decreasing our body’s own manufacture of natural antioxidants, such as CoQ10. Obesity also affects our immune system. All these disrupted processes put our body in a state of oxidative stress. Things compound further if we also burden our body with food that is highly processed, fried, or burnt to a crisp as these are also high in free radicals.
Everybody should take a good, hard, look at the type of food they eat, not only people who are overweight. Food is converted into fuel by mitochondria located within almost every cell in our body. These delicate organelles require the right amount of protein, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals to function properly. We owe it to ourselves to ensure what we put into our mouths is going to be good for us.
Remember:
Even if we eat reasonably healthy food, we often eat too much of it. Advertising has fooled us into thinking an all-you-can eat plateful of food or massive burger is a reasonable meal. In fact, we need less food than we think. Portions of carbohydrate and meat should be no more than the size of your cupped hand and take up ¼ of a dinner plate. Almost half of your dinner plate should consist of vegetables (excluding high carbohydrate vegetables such as potatoes). Foods that are high in sugar or fat should only be eaten in small quantities.
Exercise is so much more than just a way to keep weight off. Even people who are at their ideal body weight need to exercise. Why?
Exercise improves the functioning of our cells and makes several cellular reactions more efficient, decreasing the formation of free radicals and reducing oxidative stress. Since mitochondria are the major site of many cellular reactions they are profoundly affected by exercise.
But we’re not talking just a walk in the park here. To be effective, exercise must be of the moderate-to-vigorous variety, so it should make you sweat or feel tired. And you need to do it for at least half an hour on at least five days a week.
If you haven’t exercised for a while, start slowly with three ten-minute chunks each day. Find something fun to do, like dancing, boxing, or a group fitness session, and stick with it. Experts also recommend at least two or three sessions of resistance exercises a week such as weights or Pilates. Resistance exercise build muscle mass and boost up your mitochondria.
So, what are you waiting for? The longevity of your life depends on you eating right and exercising well, so why not make some healthy changes to your diet and get out and do some exercise today.
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