BY BRIAN FRANK & STEVE BORN
We’ve been helping people achieve peak performance and optimum health since 1987—Not by just selling amazingly effective, wholesome products, but through education about the primary role your diet plays in your life, health and physical performance. We’ve also dedicated almost four decades to teaching athletes how to fuel right and feel great for any type of exercise and competition.
This is why a significant portion of our web site is dedicated to these topics. You’ll find it all under the KNOWLEDGE tab, found at the top of every page on the Hammer Nutrition website!
We cover pretty much everything in the KNOWLEDGE section, including:
- How To Fuel
- Hammer Guides
- Videos
- Essential Knowledge
- Advanced Knowledge
- Endurance News Weekly
- Endurance News Magazine
- Archived Articles
- FAQ
Spend some time in the KNOWLEDGE section and it’ll soon be obvious that there is simply not a more in-depth, all-encompassing knowledge resource than Hammer Nutrition’s!
Back to the 4 Pillars, everything we’ve ever written and every single Hammer product we’ve ever sold is based on these four immutable truths. This will never change!
- Avoid ALL Processed Foods – If it has a wrapper, comes in a package or a can, it’s bad.
- Sugar – Unless it’s whole fruit, it’s bad.
- Eat Whole foods – The way nature intended.
- Supplement – Deficiency is guaranteed if you do not.
1) AVOID PROCESSED FOODS
By definition, all processed foods contain one or more of these highly toxic, health damaging, performance sapping substances, so avoid them like the plague:
- Refined Sugar – If it’s not a piece of whole fruit, it’s refined and toxic.
- Refined Seed Oils – These may very well be public enemy #1.
- High Sodium – Some is good, more is not better.
These all go hand-in-hand, as processed foods contain copious amounts of added sugar (usually high-fructose corn syrup), sodium—and processed seed oils, such as canola oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, safflower oil, etc. In the article “Processed Seed Oils - Undeniably Damaging to Your Health,” which you will find in the Endurance News Weekly link on the KNOWLEDGE tab, we write:
While sugar remains the primary enemy of your health, salt and processed seed oils are in a virtual tie with sugar at the top of the “bad for your health” podium. Dr. Chris Knobbe's eye-opening video lecture, "Diseases of Civilization: Are Seed Oil Excesses the Unifying Mechanism?" [1] provides more-than-ample evidence that processed seed oils are indeed a primary key to a vast number of chronic diseases that can affect every one of us. Dr. Knobbe boldly states:
"While processed foods are driving virtually all of this chronic disease, it is the seed oils that are the primary drivers because they are the biological poisons. Again, they are poisons, plain and simple."
These seed oils "now make up 63% of the American diet, form the basis of USDA food recommendations, and are found in 600,000 processed foods sold in the U.S. today," according to Dr. Knobbe. "In 1909, Americans ate 2 grams a day of vegetable oil, says Knobbe, and by 2010 they were eating an astounding 80 grams of vegetable oil a day." [1]
REFERENCE: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kGnfXXIKZM
Dr. Knobbe states that these industrially processed seed oils "drive the oxidation. They're pro-oxidative, proinflammatory, and toxic, but of all of these, it is oxidation. That is by far the worst."
2) AVOID SUGAR
This is a bit redundant, but due to its ubiquity in our food supply and extreme addictiveness, it needs to be restated and given its own pillar. We’ve never been shy about calling out sugar as the heinous, evil substance in your diet. As I often say, “Sugar is the devil!”
Since day one, our position has always been to extremely limit the amount of refined sugar you consume – 50 grams or just under two ounces is a great target. The adverse health and performance issues associated with sugar are far too many to list here— some of the most serious are heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and several cancers—and that’s why the KNOWLEDGE tab on our web site is filled with articles on this topic!
3) EAT LOCALLY GROWN WHOLE FOODS
This pillar is really just the antithesis of our first pillar. Don’t eat processed foods, do eat whole foods. Locally grown and organic whenever possible.
The primary reason to eat a variety of whole foods is for the countless health-benefiting phytochemicals that only fresh fruits and vegetables can provide, in addition to vitamins and minerals. One example is a naturally occurring flavonoid found in various fruits (mainly strawberries) called fisetin. Research has shown that fisetin has strong antioxidant properties (which helps neutralize the negative effects of free radicals) and appears to have numerous other health-boosting properties. Your best opportunity to give your body adequate amounts of fisetin is to eat whole strawberries and other fisetin-containing foods. Ditto for every other fruit and vegetable; you can only obtain the many health-benefiting nutrients they contain by eating them.
Additionally, locally grown (unsprayed or organic) foods are picked at their peak ripeness and have a shorter time from harvest to your consumption of them. That means higher amounts of that food’s beneficial content for your body. Conventionally grown food, often harvested early to allow for shipment and distribution to stores, is almost always significantly lower in nutrients. Additionally, most (if not all) local growers adopt organic growing practices, which produce clean pure, clean food free of pesticides, herbicides, or other chemicals.
You’ll find many more diet-specific articles in the KNOWLEDGE section!
4) SUPPLEMENTS – A Modern Necessity
The “balanced diet” is a complete myth! It simply is not possible to meet your body’s nutritional needs through diet alone. Anyone who suggests you can is guilty of ignorance or is being intentionally misleading. Unless you supplement wisely, you are living in a state of nutrient deficiency that is affecting your health and physical performance.
Nutritional scientist Bruce Ames bluntly states: “Inadequate dietary intakes of vitamins and minerals are widespread, most likely due to excessive consumption of energy-rich, micronutrient-poor, refined food. Inadequate intakes may result in chronic metabolic disruption, including mitochondrial decay.” [1] One research study concluded: "Nearly the entire U.S. population consumes a diet that is not on par with recommendations.” [2]
For more, please see the article “The Balanced Diet Myth and the Need to Supplement”.
Bottom Line: To achieve your best performance with consistency—and even more importantly, enjoy optimal health and longevity—then daily supplementation is a necessity, not an option. Consume an optimal diet as consistently as possible and augment that with sufficient amounts of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and complementary nutrients. This is the best way to more completely cover all your nutritional bases, allowing you to achieve higher-quality workouts, better results in your events, and, most importantly, superior health.
REFERENCES:
[1] Ames, B. Low micronutrient intake may accelerate the degenerative diseases of aging through allocation of scarce micronutrients by triage. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. November 21, 2006; 103 (47): 17589-94. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17101959
[2] Krebs-Smith S, Guenther P, et al. Americans do not meet federal dietary recommendations. The Journal of Nutrition. October 2010; 140 (10): 1832-8. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20702750
