Research from the University of Exeter just reported that taking a supplement that increases the nitric oxide in your body could significantly boost your stamina during high-intensity exercise.

Exeter first started their research with beet juice and showed how the high content of nitrate in beet juice can boost your nitric oxide level and lead to an increase in performance.

The supplement used in this study is Ark 1, which is made up of L-arginine an amino acid, which enhances the production of nitric oxide in the body. The study took two groups; one was given a placebo drink and the other the Ark 1(L-arginine rich) drink.

The researches concluded that the supplement:

• Improved very high intensity exercise endurance by 20%
• Reduced systolic blood pressure
• Decreased the oxygen cost of exercise

These findings were published online by Science Daily & the Journal of Applied Physiology.

Andrew Jones, from the University’s School of Sport and Health Sciences, said: “The research found that when the dietary supplement was used there was a striking increase in performance by altering the use of oxygen during exercise.

“This is important for endurance athletes as we would expect the supplement to bring a 1-2% improvement in race times. While this may seem small, this is a very meaningful improvement — particularly at elite levels where small gains can be the difference between winning and losing.”

It looks like L-arginine and beet juice can both possibly increase your high intensity performance with the added kicker of lowering your blood pressure. I will be keeping my eyes open for more conclusive research on the benefits of drinking beet juice or taking an L-arginine supplement.

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Best – Mike Cola

Demystifying Fitness

Here is a list of some of my favorite snack combinations. When combining and choosing different foods for healthy snacks, look for three things:  protein, healthy fat and low glycemic carbohydrates.  Low glycemic carbohydrates release sugar into the blood stream slowly over time.

Look at snacks like little meals. One of the big mistakes people make when choosing snacks is not balancing the snack with good nutrition. When your making dinner you would not just eat meat and nothing else.  For example, you would have a piece of fish for your protein and healthy fat, and hopefully a few different vegetables with olive oil for your carbohydrates and additional healthy fats. When making a snack, do the same thing. Have some protein, fat and low glycemic carbohydrates.

Top Ten List of my Favorite Snack Combinations

• Hard-Boiled Egg and Cherries
• Walnuts and Grapes
• Beef Jerky and Celery
• Dark Chocolate and Almonds
• Greek Yogurt and Sunflower Seeds
• Berries & Macadamia Nuts
• Salmon Jerky and Carrots
• Apple and Peanut Butter
• Edamame and Tomato
• Avocado and Tuna

A Few Tips About the Snacks

• Always buy organic whenever possible.
• Look for low sodium varieties when it comes to the beef jerky, salmon jerky and all nuts and seeds.
• Make sure you wash all your fruit and vegetables thoroughly.
• You can buy frozen eda-nami and quickly boil it and keep it in the refrigerator.
• Add olive oil to the edamame and tomato.
• Buy the canned tuna in olive oil.
• Don’t over do the dark chocolate. That’s the only snack on the list that is not quite like a meal but I love dark chocolate.
• You can find fresh ground peanut butter at most health food stores.
• Use the Glycemic index when making your own snack combination.

Let me know if you like my snack combinations and e-mail me a list of your favorite healthy snacks. I would be very interested to see what you are snacking on.

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Best – Mike Cola

Demystifying Nutrition

One of the biggest problems with insulin is that it stops your body from burning fat.  When insulin levels are high from eating too many sugars like processed carbohydrates you are pretty much locking in the fat in your fat cells and not letting it out to be burned off.

There have been books written about the ill effects of insulin and how it is more important than calories for losing weight. Chronic high insulin levels do lead to weight gain and a number of other health issues like obesity, insulin-resistance, diabetes and heart disease.  Nevertheless, we all need optimal amounts of insulin to help store the foods we eat in our muscles, liver and fat cells.

Insulin is a very important storage hormone and it is not all bad. In fact, it is critical for good health. Insulin is a hormone produced by the pancreas that helps lower blood sugar by storing it. All the problems with insulin start when there is too much sugar in the blood from eating too many empty carbohydrate calories. When your eating sugar and processing carbohydrates all day long and not instantly burning them off with activity your body has to remove all the excess blood sugar (excess calories) and store them. The body can store sugar in the muscles and in the liver in the form of glycogen.  But if your glycogen levels are full (and they quickly can be if you’re eating a lot of carbohydrates) your body will store the excess sugar calories as fat in your fat cells.

When insulin levels are consistently high there is no way you will be burning fat because you’re programming your body to store sugar not burn fat. Just like insulin is a storage hormone, there are other hormones like glucagon that help release fat from your fats cells so it can be burned off. The problem is if your insulin levels are always high you will never produce enough releasing hormones like glucagon to burn fat. Look at it like this; if you’re always making the hormones to store sugar and fat and very rarely making the hormones that release fat into the blood stream to be burned, you have a big problem.

What’s good about insulin is you can control it by not eating too many processed carbohydrates. You can program your body to burn fat by taking the empty sugary calories out of your diet. Most of the carbohydrates in your diet should come from a variety of vegetables, fruits and a limited amount of unprocessed grains depending on your activity level.

Insulin can help you or hurt you. Stop eating the junk and improve your health and keep insulin working for you.

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Best – Mike Cola

Demystifying Nutrition

One of the supplements I take every day is omega-3 fish oil. Its becoming harder and harder to find goods sources of omega-3 oils in the US. Fish is one of the few foods that is high in omega-3 oils but wild caught fish is expensive and not always available or in season.

After reading about all the proven benefits of omega-3 oils a few years ago I started taking a fish oil supplement. I made a video this past winter about the fish oil supplement I take every day and it is being featured on Men’s Fitness web site called Code Liver Oil is a Great Source of Vitamin D. Check out the video below about the cod liver oil supplement I take every day and some of the benefits of taking it.

Benefits of Taking Omega-3 Oils

• Decreased risk of heart disease and cancer
• Improvements in brain function and mood
• Reduced inflammation in joints
• Lowering triglycerides and increasing HDL (good cholesterol)
• Helps control insulin

Omega-3 oils are like taking natural medicine. I take 3 or more grams everyday.  Make sure you check with your doctor; however, before taking any supplement.

Let me know if you’re taking a fish oil supplement and if it has helped you in any way.

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Demystifying Nutrition

Best – Mike Cola

Conventional wisdom will tell you that eating the yolks of eggs will raise your cholesterol and lead to heart disease.  Here at Fitness Contrarian; however, we feel the opposite. Egg yolks are the most nutritious part of the egg.

Whole eggs have been a corner stone of my breakfast for years.  One of my favorite breakfasts are three large whole organic eggs made in an omelet with half an avocado and a few slices of tomato. First, I heat up the pan with medium to light heat, add a little bit of olive oil, scramble up the eggs, cut up the avocado, slice up the tomato and pour it all into the pan.  I use a spoon to push down the edges so it is easy to fold and then flip. It only takes about 6 or 7 minutes to make. I normally have this with a cup of coffee (with a little half and half; no sugar) and a piece of fruit.

Whole eggs are a great source of protein, fat, selenium, folate and B vitamins. It’s important to eat only organic eggs. The organic grass-feed chicken eggs have up to 20% more omega-3s (the healthy fats) than the factory grain-feed chicken eggs. The popular belief that eating the yolk can lead to high cholesterol and is not heart healthy is a misnomer. The yolk is loaded with healthy omega-3s and other important nutrients.

A Harvard Medical School study of 115,000 subjects over a 14-year span showed no correlation between eating one whole egg a day and heart disease or stroke.  In addition, another study from the International Journal of Obesity suggested that eating two whole eggs for breakfast over a bagel helped participant’s lose weight.

Eggs are affordable, nutritious and easy to make. Give my recipe a try and let me know if you like it.

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Best – Mike Cola

Demystifying Nutrition

I ran a contest last year called Get Fat Fast. In this contest I asked everyone who is having trouble loosing weight to write down the 10 foods they would eat if they had to gain weight quickly (clink the link Get Fat Fast and checkout some of the lists people sent in). This is an exercise I have had my personal training clients do to help them lose weight. The reason for making the list is to change how you feel about eating the foods that make you fat fast.

If you can change the association you have with the unhealthy foods you eat, you will stop eating them. You have to convince yourself that eating the foods on your list will bring you more pain then pleasure. To change your behavior and stop eating foods that will make you over weight, you have to develop various negative associations (physical, mental and medical) with these foods. The pain has to greatly out way the quick pleasure of eating these foods.

How to use your get fat fast list

Foremost, if you have not made up your list, do it right now. Write down the 10 foods you would eat if you had to gain weight as fast as possible. Next, take each food on your list and go through the following process.

1. Write down all the pleasure you get from eating this food and how it makes you feel.

2. Write down all the pain it will cause you if you keep eating this food on a regular basis. Be very specific. List what it will do to your physical appearance. List what it will do to your health. List how you feel mentally after you eat it. List how it will effect your family, friends and your career. You have to convince your brain that eating these foods will cause you so much pain that it’s not worth eating them.

3. Write down a healthy replacement food for eating the food or drink on your list.

4. Write down how much pleasure you get from eating the foods on your new  healthy list.

Here is an example of a food on my list – Meatball Parmigiana Hero

1. The pleasure I get from eating a meatball parmigiana hero:

• Tastes good
• Filling
• Quick and easy to eat.

2. The pain from eating a meatball parmigiana hero:

Physical Appearance Pain:

• It will make me fat
• If I’m over weight I will not look like a personal trainer
• I will not look physically fit

Health Pain:

• It’s loaded with salt and can raise my blood pressure and lead to a number of health issues like diabetes, obesity and high cholesterol to name a few.
• It’s fried in unhealthy oil, can lower good HDL cholesterol and raise bad LDL cholesterol.

Mental Pain:

• I feel guilty for over eating and knowing that it is not good for me.
• I feel like I’m out of control of what I eat and have no will power
• I can’t think clearly because I over ate

The Pain it Will Cause My Family, Friends and Career:

• I will not live a long life
• I will not see my kids grow up and have a family
• I will not be able to play with my kids because I will be overweight and out of shape
• I won’t be able to play sports competitively with my friends
• I can lose my career; no one is going to listen to a personal trainer who is overweight

3. Replacement Food:

• Grilled chicken over salad

4. Pleasure from Replacement Food:

• I have no guilt; I know it’s a healthy meal
• It tastes good and is filling
• I will not get fat from this meal; it’s good nutrition
• I  feel in control of my eating by making a good choice
• I  feel healthy; no sugar crash
• I’m helping my career by eating healthy

I know it’s time consuming to go through this process for every food on your list but it works. If you can associate a great deal of pain with eating these foods and than a great deal of pleasure for eating healthy foods you will never have a weight problem again. Keep sending me your lists. Give this exercise a try  and let me know if this process is working for you.

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Best – Mike Cola

Demystifying Nutrition

You have to assume that every hamburger you eat or any ground beef you’re cooking can have E. Coli in it. Ever since the scare back in 2007 when over 845,000 pounds of ground beef was recalled for possible E. Coli contamination, I never trusted eating hamburgers that I did not thoroughly cook myself.

E. Coli can be a deadly bacterium that can be easily prevented by cooking your ground beef completely. Jeff Bender an expert on food safety from the University of Minnesota said “ With ground beef, you should just assume that E. Coli can be there, so it’s important to thoroughly cook the product and avoid cross-contamination in the kitchen”.  Nutrition Action reported in their March health letter that in the past three years there have been more than 16 reported outbreaks of ground beef contaminated with E. Coli.

How do you know if ground beef is cooked enough?

The only real way to know if your meat is cooked enough is to use a meat thermometer but I have never seen anyone use a meat thermometer beside myself to cook a hamburger. When ever I barbeque or cook beef, poultry or pork, I always use a thermometer to make sure the food is safe to eat.

What cooking temperature kills E. Coli?

You can’t go by the color of your meat to determine if it is cooked enough. You have to cook any food to 160° F to kill E. Coli  and the only way to tell is by using a meat thermometer.

More tips to protect your self from E. Coli.

Don’t think that you are safe if you ask the butcher to ground up a steak for you. The exterior of the steak can be contaminated and when it is ground up it winds up in the middle. Therefore, you still have to cook it to 160°F.

I try to buy USDA certified organic  meat whenever possible. The meat tastes better, is better for you and will most likely not be infected with E. Coli.  I still always cook the organic meat to 160°F; however,  to play it safe.

Let me know your experiences with E. Coli. Do you use a meat thermometer?

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Best – Mike Cola

Demystifying  Nutrition

Eating less can be as simple as not putting the serving dishes on the table.  A new study from Cornell University called “Serve Here: Eat There” looked at the eating habits of 78 adults.

Brian Wansink, the director of the Cornell Food & Brand Lab said “We looked at whether serving foods from the kitchen counter, instead of at the table, would reduce the number of times a person refilled his or her plate”.  The research showed that when they kept the serving dishes out of sight and not on the table, women eat 20% fewer calories and men eat 29% fewer calories.

The researchers also pointed out that this strategy can work to increase the number of healthy foods your family can eat like vegetables and fruits by keeping them out in the open and easily accessible.

Brian Wansink is the author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.

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Best  - Mike Cola

Demystifying  Nutrition