plant based nutrition for athletes

FOOD AND NUTRITION PHILOSOPHY (WHEN DID EATING BECOME SO COMPLICATED?)

Visit any supermarket today and you'll see shelves lined with hundreds of items that just a few decades ago would have scarcely been recognized as food. 

• Yogurt in a tube

 • lunchables 

• Pasteurized processed cheese food

 • Cheese in a CO2 can

 • Pepsi Max Cease Fire. designed—no joke—to put out the fire in your mouth caused by spicy Doritos Degree Burn 

A lot of this—actually, all of it—is junk. Yet, what about all the "health food" we now have because of modern technology? Certainly, we're better off because of that, right? You don't even have CO visit a specialty health store to find most of the following: 

• Margarine fortified with omega-3 fatty acids

 • Breads and milk pumped full of extra vitamins and minerals

 • Soda that tastes sweet but has zero calories 

• Multivitamins that provide us with ten times the amount of the vitamins and minerals we need each day

 • Lab-designed meal replacement shakes for any diet you happen to be on 

Much of the food people buy these days is so loaded with preservatives that it will never even rot! With all of this high-tech food available, it seems like we should be healthier than ever. You can walk into the health section of any bookstore and find hundreds of options promising to solve all your problems with the latest and greatest diet approach. And yet rates of obesity in adults and children continue to grow, raising the risk of serious diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and certain cancers. It's said that our generation might be the first that fails to outlive its parents. 

What Happened? 

Food used to be simple. Tens of thousands of years ago, before the development of agriculture, our ancestors hunted and gathered. Nuts, legumes, roots, fruits, veg-etables, meat when it was available, and little else. There were no artificial preserva-tives, and most ways of preserving food had not been discovered. We ace what we acquired quickly, before it could rot or be stolen by another human being or animal, because the next meal was rarely a sure thing. We didn't know what protein, fats, or carbohydrates were, much less antioxidants and free radicals. But with all these seeming disadvantages compared to what we have at our disposal today, there was one huge factor our ancestors had going for them that we no longer have: Back then, ifa food tasted good, it was almost certainly good for you. In fact, that's precisely why it tasted good. If you've never thought much about evolution, it's worth taking a second to understand how beautifully elegant the process is. 

What's the solution ?