elitefts™ Sunday Edition
These days, there are advances in nutrition almost on a weekly basis. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of building muscle. With these advances, nutrition and what you think you know can become quite confusing even for the person who has a relatively good grasp of how to eat healthy and how to feed his body to build muscle. Keep in mind though that sometimes what you know can work against you.
I've been researching nutrition for well over thirty years, and I've been helping to condition top level athletes and bodybuilders for over twenty of those years. Some nutritional “facts” back in the day have been disproved. Keep in mind that we didn’t have different flavors of cancer back then to flavor our foods either. Bodybuilders celebrated the day that Butter Buds came out and argued that it should be a national holiday. Coconut oil back then was an absolute no no. Now? Not so much. Live and learn, I guess.
There are a lot of healthy foods to choose from these days. Yet we sit back and most times overanalyze our diets to the point where most bodybuilders end up with fewer than ten different types of foods per day while others might have fewer than five. The main reason for this is simply because we all want to have the “best” foods to make the most progress. We hear about a certain food having too much of this or that food having too much of that, and we're told to avoid things that don’t necessarily have to be avoided.
Many trainers/nutritionists feed this problem by giving their clients biased information about certain foods because of one property in the food that they don’t like. One component of a particular food in a healthy diet with a variety of other foods isn't a good reason to avoid a food altogether. Here are four examples.
Nuts
This is a pretty broad category and I use it for that very reason. Not all nuts are created equal. Some have a much more favorable ratio of monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, and saturated fat. The argument against nuts is that they have higher amounts of omega 6 fatty acids and the body really doesn’t need them because the body will get enough of them in the diet anyway. OK, but nuts are still a great source of fiber and healthy fat. It's always better to get more omega 3 fatty acids because the large majority of us will be low in omega 3s as opposed to omega 6s and omega 9s (the body can produce omega 9s). It wouldn’t be wise to avoid nuts because they contain omega 6s and some saturated fat when there are other components of eating nuts that make them a good choice. Sure, add in fats that have omega 3s, but don’t avoid nuts.
Fish
I don’t know how many times we've heard that we shouldn't eat tuna in a can or salmon and other fish because of mercury levels. Salmon and other fatty fish (don't ever try to take mackerel off my plate at a sushi restaurant—I'll kill you for it) are high in omega 3s and a great source of protein. I've heard the mercury stories and I can’t necessarily dispute them. What I can say is that I ate enough canned tuna when I was young and broke that if the mercury levels were as high as they say they are, I would be dead or glowing by now. We eat salmon once a week at my house as a family. I don't have any worries about whether or not my kids will be able to reproduce, and my nine-year old daughter hasn’t had to have a hysterectomy yet. I think we're good. Salmon is a great source of protein and healthy fats that are high in omega 3s.
Potatoes
Potatoes get a bad rap simply because of the glycemic index. If I had been a potato farmer, I would have wished that I had sold the potato farm when the glycemic index became the last word for dieting about ten years ago. A potato comes out of the ground and man hasn’t gotten his hands on it to screw it up before you wash it and eat it. That pretty much means that it is good to go. See, the more man touches something, the more screwed up it becomes at least in the world of food (or in my case, in my house if you ask my wife). Leaving potatoes out of your diet isn’t any more necessary or logical than eating nineteen of them a day. It’s called moderation.
Fruit
This one is my favorite. Not many people who are looking to get lean will go anywhere near fruit. Apparently, they were taught that all sugar is bad and that fructose is only used by the liver and blah, blah, blah. More crap information fed to the uninformed.
Just like nuts, fruits don’t all have the same make up of sugars, so some are better than others. But again, if they come out of the ground and man hasn’t had a chance to screw them up, they have more positive nutritional attributes than negative. And if you think that your body won’t store the sugar from fruit in skeletal muscle, do your homework. Get really depleted from dieting and training, eat fruit, and see what happens. If your muscles swell up, I win. If your liver swells up, you win.
These are only four examples, but there are many, many more. The bottom line is that if you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find something negative about almost any food. Instead of finding the negative in foods and trying to eliminate them from our diets, we should be looking at foods, finding the positives, and adding them to our diets. Moderation is the key and usually bodybuilders lack moderation (duh). The more variety in our diets, the less boring the diet will be, and with more variety comes more micronutrients. Let me dumb it down for the meatheads who don’t follow what I'm saying—have more variety in your diet and get bigger and leaner and enjoy eating because choking down yet another dry chicken breast and dry broccoli just doesn’t sound like fun times. Just sayin’.
