How Can Supplements Help Maintain Your Health?

Exercise and training places huge demands on the muscles and internal organs and if the extra nutrient requirements is not met on a daily basis, the body starts to get run down. This leads to immune issues such as constant colds, sore throats, cold sores etc.

If you don’t keep up with the extra requirements of supplements that the body is screaming for, then the over training syndrome occurs, which means the loss of performance, the loss of muscle tissue, loss of energy and endurance.

If the extra nutrient requirements is not met on a daily basis, the body starts to get run down

If this is left too long unaddressed, then you can suffer the fate of becoming chronically fatigue, a condition you may never ever recover from. One of the worst things that happens when you train, is oxidating damage to the body which can be dangerous to your overall health and longevity.

Oxidating damage and ageing of the cells is caused by free radicals being released into the blood stream as a result of muscle breakdown, acidosis and burning of the fat.

This is all toxic to the human body and therefore, it is critically important that the cells are protected by a daily intake of antioxidants such as vitamin C, vitamin A, vitamin E, bioflavonoids, beta carotene, folic acid and selenium etc.

And that’s a result of the tissue, muscles and the fat competing with the blood supply. If your body doesn’t have a lot of antioxidants, then there’s no protective measure around the cells and the cells can be very badly damaged. That means DNA damage inside the cells, damage to the membranes . . . all that can have an impact on a particular organ like the liver.

DNA damage to the cells occurs with an inadequate intake of antioxidants

So the idea is, you need to get plenty of these types of foods into your diet that will nourish the body over and above its normal demand. You can go and eat fruit and veges from the supermarket and live a normal life and that should be okay. But when we stress our body due to exercise or putting chemicals into our body like cigarette smoking, that’s when we actually need extra protection. And if we don’t supplement on a daily basis, you are in big trouble. The end result will be break down of the human body and you don’t want that. So the idea is, in all cases, protect yourself and that’s why there’s a lot of advertisement lately with antioxidants.

I recommend just for a start, getting one particular type of antioxidant, drink 3 cups of green tea a day. Then eat the right fruits and berries and all the foods that contain very powerful antioxidants. Now I’ve just talked about one reason to supplement. There are 100 other reasons you need to supplement over and above your daily diet if you want to be a champion, body builder or sports athlete.

There are 100 other reasons you need to supplement over and above your daily diet

It’s absolutely diabolically wrong for the media to tell people that you need to eat iron man food and breakfast of champions food, that’s rubbish. You can not get enough nutrient value out of powdered and crunched up foods that have all the goodness taken out of them and virtually no goodness put back in, apart from a massive load of sugar.

If you have champions and BMX riders getting up and having iron man food for breakfast and then not supplementing on top of that, they will not be able to perform properly because iron man food contains so much sugar, it ends up spiking the blood sugar levels and you end up getting more of a lull in your energy levels instead of a boost because you’ve put too much sugar at a given time and you didn’t balance it out throughout the day.

Blood sugar spiking with the wrong food intake

So therefore it becomes important to know to supplement with proteins for instance, which is a way to mediating and helping to normalise blood sugar levels. It doesn’t mean you can’t eat iron man food. It is rubbish food as far as I’m concerned and that is only my opinion but if you do eat rubbish like that, where are you going to get your nutrients from? So therefore supplementation is very important.

This information is only the tip of the total information that’s available to an athlete or what I would tell them. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I have learnt a lot through trial and error, studying and personal involvement. I’ve used a lot of these formulas and supplements and I know that they work.

Sports nutritionist Barry Andrews

About Barry Andrews

I am a sports nutritionist. I apply naturopathy, natural medicine and natural repair processes to sports regime, looking for the more natural point of view instead of commercially. I’ve combined two fields – natural nutrition and sports nutrition which is a perfect combination for a natural way of looking at the human body.

I used to be a state road and track racer back in Grafton, New South Wales. But that was in my young days. I used to be a champion swimmer and when I was in my early 30’s, my father and I were body builders. My dad was an Australian champion body builder and world champion wrestler and he knew a lot about the natural nutrition and how important it was to eat protein and supplements back in the 60’s.

Barry Andrews interviewed by Delphine Jamet