The BEST Time to Take Antioxidants to Boost Longevity (and the WORST)

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look I'll be the first to say antioxidants are good antioxidants are great I think they have their place but antioxidants as you've probably heard me talk about before should be used efficaciously like at specific times otherwise they are hugely detrimental but I've learned some new stuff that I want to share with you specifically surrounding stressful situations and specifically surrounding workouts now in order to understand this we have to understand how the body particularly muscles recover and once we've gone through all this you'll understand when not to take an antioxidant and two specific times to take them to actually get a maximum benefit from them let's dive in today's video is brought To Us by Bond charge in their sauna blanket if you don't have the space for a massive sauna then I definitely recommend you try Bond charges sauna blanket it's an infrared sauna blanket super low EMF and we're talking getting up to like over 170 degrees so you can get your sweat on you can get that benefit in a very a portable way now I'm not talking like fit in your suitcase on an airplane type portable but definitely easy to fold up into like a one and a half by one and a half foot area that you could bring in your car with you so if I'm traveling go into a hotel or something like that on the road super easy to bring my sauna with me you've heard me talk about the benefits as far as heat shock proteins as far as lymphatic system helping the brain helping you sleep so now you can take it with you or have it even in a small space maybe you've got an apartment or something like that so I popped a link down below that also saves you some money if you want to try one out so there's a discount link down below first line of the description underneath this video you've got to check them out they're doing some really really cool stuff and awesome to see something so portable so it's common theory that when we're stressed out or when we're under physical stress like a workout or whatever that we should be increasing our antioxidant intake because it's going to help us blunt the oxidative stress that comes as a result of that and that makes sense and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that well do I shut down endogenous production of these antioxidants in other words by taking antioxidants after a workout do I actually stop the body from being able to recover and the short answer to that is yes but there's a lot more data that we know now that can allow us to strategically use them so first off when a muscle cell is working and a muscle contracts you have a couple of filaments you have myofilaments so you have actin and myosin and essentially they slide over each other and contract and that's how muscle contracts well at a cellular chemical level what's happening is you have calcium binding to a protein called troponin and when this happens they bind to each other the troponin kind of bends and calcium grabs it and kind of hooks onto it and pulls it and that causes that muscle to contract this pulling of calcium and troponin locking onto each other well what we have seen is that when there is lots of oxidative stress it makes it so that those don't bind as well so you get less of a muscle contraction so that furthers the notion that oh well I should be taking antioxidants when I work out I should be taking antioxidants when I'm moving because it's increasing the contractile force and that's actually very very true it can increase the effectiveness which is why you see it in pre-workouts and things like that the big problem comes when we start looking at the data as far as recovery and adaptation is concerned so there was a study published in the journal physiology that gave subjects a thousand milligrams of vitamin C and a couple hundred milligrams of vitamin E and they had them do hit training and endurance work and all of this and then they did some muscle biopsies and this is where stuff got kind of scary they found that mitochondrial biogenesis the actual like adaptation at the mitochondrial level had gone down 13 in the group that had the antioxidants but it went up 19 and 59 respectively in the groups that did not okay so what we're seeing here is that antioxidants coming in can actually help you perform better that day but they are a detriment to the mitochondrial biogenesis and the actual not only Muscle Recovery benefit but the actual health benefit that you get from workouts so doing something good by taking antioxidants is actually impeding your ability to get healthier in many ways so if you are someone that is an athlete which I know a lot of people watching this video are not professional athletes but let's just acknowledge this for a second if you're an athlete and you need to compete or you're running and you have your run on race day right that would be a great day to take the antioxidants you accept the fact that you're going to get a little performance boost out of it but it is going to be detrimental to your recovery but you're not going for adaptation that day you're going for a trophy right adaptation happens during the training now the same kind of thing can happen during stressful events as far as like different reactions is within the body being tense and all this kind of stuff if you're stressed out you don't always want to just take antioxidants as a crutch right you want to allow your body the ability to deal with it but if it becomes chronic then it's a problem too so you need to periodically take in you know vitamin C vitamin E alpha lipoic acid things like that okay I'm a big fan of alpha lipoic acid because it's fat soluble and I feel like you can body can use it at different rates and it's very very good for the skin anyway I digress I do another video on that point is is that you need to periodically take it so the oxidative stress is what triggers the brain to kick-start adaptation without the reactive oxygen species there's no stimuli to actually recover and get better it's like you're not training with that weight vest on so you're never going to get better and stronger now there's an interesting paper published in a Scandinavian Journal this took a look at antioxidant Rich diet compared to antioxidant supplementation they found that an antioxidant-rich diet did not impair recovery and mitochond androbiogenesis at high altitude extreme training whereas supplementation did so if you're worried about oh I don't want to have that strawberry after my workout something about the natural ability and the natural just container of having antioxidants in their natural bioavailable form doesn't seem to affect this because when we're taking antioxidant supplements that is a serious dose at a very specific time and that can be detrimental but what about just getting antioxidants in for antioxidants sake okay well first of all nutrition is going to be the number one way right strawberries raspberries leafy greens lean red meat that has lots of minerals and nutrients in it as well but if you're going to have it have it at least four hours away from your workout okay or four hours away from any stressful period try to have them towards the end of the day when you have more food in your system and that can help you out immensely so when it comes to your post-workout nutrition your protein and getting your phytonutrients from fruit those polyphenols from fruit might not be a bad idea so maybe a protein shake some lean meat some strawberries some raspberries maybe a little bit of mango something like that where you're getting a diversity of fruits but you're also getting the carbohydrates that you might want post workout and hot tip you may want to wait 30 minutes post workout because you want your body to get that additional fat burn that kind of continues sort of riding the wave so to speak after your workout and then as far as supplements that you can take around dinner time that might help you out again I'm a fan of alpha lipoic acid I'm a fan of vitamin C but try not to do it in the ascorbic acid form try to do it in a whole food form like as a roll of fruit or something like that you can find forms a vitamin C supplement that are not asorbic acid okay vitamin E I don't take a lot of it's good for the skin occasionally but I just think there's better antioxidants echinacea echinacea is just nice just because it is more of a fruit extract things like haskap Berry not a supplement but a concentrated Berry okay that's you're going to find it like Nova Scotia like in Northern Canada so a very very polyphenol anthocyanin Rich Berry extract that you can get again in powder form you can get it liquid form things like that cod liver oil that's going to be a natural anti-inflammatory that's going to be natural antioxidant effect just because the Omega-3s so you kind of want to look at this holistically rather than just quick shot in the arm of a mega dose of something I'll see you tomorrow