sugar

The Dental Diet: Nutritional Tactics for Healthy Teeth

Quick Tips

Dental health is highly impacted by the food that we eat.

Again, what we eat plays an important role in the upkeep of our dental health.

Unfortunately, not many of us fully grasp how much food impacts not just the aesthetic appeal of our smile, but also our ability to chew (assuming you lose teeth or experience pain) and early signals of systemic problems such as:

  • Cardiovascular disease
  • Celiac disease
  • Diabetes
  • Sinus infection
  • Alcoholism
  • …etc

To quote a phenomenal article from Precision Nutrition,

“If the eyes are a window to the soul, our teeth and gums are a window to our bodies”.

Pretty powerful statement actually, because keeping your mouth happy is important.  A happy mouth could increase the chances that you have a healthy body.

It’s funny how many warning signals the body gives us before complete self-destruction.

If we over-extend current physical limits or over-do high impact exercise, we often end up aches/pains or even limping to prevent further damage.  Or take the Iron Man competitor who’s body shuts down prior to experiencing internal damage from “system-overload” physical exertion.

The body knows when enough is enough, and it appears that the mouth provides another source of warning signals to keep us in check.

If you’re not giving your body the vitamins and minerals that it needs, or possibly consuming excess sugary or highly process foods, cavities and periodontal disease can be the result.  But I think we all know this right?

Sure, basic tooth care like brushing and flossing is essential to combat any mouth damage, this should go without saying.

So what role do nutrients play in establishing a solid foundation of mouth health (teeth and gums)?

Here is a kick ass chart created that I borrowed from Precision Nutrition:

credit: Precision Nutrition

Credit: Precision Nutrition

You’re probably thinking, “Great, another chart sharing nutrients, but what in the hell do I actually have to eat to leverage the benefits of the above nutrients?”

Well, the answer (minus the jargon) is whole food.  That may come as a disappointment to my readers, but its the hard truth.

Something similar to this picture:

… that plus lean protein.

A diet heavy in veggies and lean protein is the “secret”. (Yes I used the word “secret”).

There are no secrets.  Only information that you know or you don’t know, and actions you take or you don’t take.  Secrets are what people use to lure you into throwing $$$ at products.  But we’ve covered this extensively in other posts haven’t we?

I wouldn’t want to beat a dead horse now, noOOOOOoooooo. 🙂

Referencing the same “Dental Diet” article from Precision Nutrition, author Ryan Andrews goes on to share some of bonus tactics to promote a healthy mouth, which include:

  • Probiotics
  • Cranberries (interesting)
  • Green tea
  • Chewing gum with pycnogenol
  • Soy (I would avoid at this point)
  • Arginine
  • CoQ10
  • Echinacea
  • Fluoride (prevents decalcification)
  • Whole foods

As Ryan comments, it is important to first seek all of the above nutrients from whole foods first.  Supplements should be treated as an addition to the whole.  In other words, supplements can be extremely beneficial for filling any nutritional gaps left by your current diet.  Supplements are plan B when plan A (your diet) isn’t enough.

Ok?

One point from the article that peaked my interest was that certain studies have shown “that the sheer amount of sugar we eat may be less harmful to dental health than the the frequency of consumption”.

So, drinking those 2-3 Mountain Dews daily is giving your teeth an sugary injection that is taking it’s toll on your tooth health.  Too many refined and processed carbohydrate-type foods and you’re heading for tooth decay and gingival inflammation.

Not good.

So what’s the game plan?

  • Brush!
  • Floss!
  • No smoking
  • Sip some tea
  • Whole foods baby
  • Eat raw, crunchy fruits and veggies daily!
  • Limit your sugar intake, especially added sugars.
  • Stay lean… excess body fat can promote poor health
  • Exercise!  (a great defense against periodontal disease)

Good game plan uh?  Notice that this game plan is essentially the same game plan used to help with hundreds of other ailments.  Healthy eating is healthy eating.  You can tailor it to promote dental health, but chances are quite high that the same diet that is going to save your teeth is also going to reduce your body fat, lose unwanted weight and fuel your body during performance based endeavors.

Eating is eating.

If you’re not executing the fundamentals, you’re missing out.  If you don’t know what the fundamentals are, I suggest you hire out and get some solid support to get your understanding of meal timing, essential vitamins and minerals and eating for performance and bodily leanness up to speed.

It’s more simple than you think but it takes practice to become habitual.

 

 

Cheers to the dietary tactics that can preserve and prevent your teeth!

KG

(I reference a lot of information found in this post that came from this article)

A Simple Workout to Help Lessen the Damage from Easter Sugar

Quick Tips

Yes, it’s a kangaroo, but it hops like a bunny.

Happy Easter and here is a dose of reality…

You won’t be able to out work the amount of sugar that most of us will consume on this wonderful Easter Sunday.

Sorry.

Bless the lord, bless your family and loved ones, but you won’t be able to do it.  The damage is done.

Well, maybe you could, if you were training for an Iron Man or some other activity that has a similar caloric expenditure.  But most of the population isn’t into the Iron Man scene, so we have to accept that the sugar that we pounded like starved dogs is going to cause some damage.

Sugar and bread are two “foods” that sabotage our internal health and our external aesthetics.

Screen Shot 2013-03-31 at 10.02.13 PM

But hot damn if those Reese’s peanut butter eggs aren’t ridiculously good, right?  I’m a sucker for peanut butter, as I am sure that some of you reading this are also.  It’s a snowball effect if I even eat just one of those things.  One turns into two, two into three, and on and on we go.  So, I tend to avoid them completely.  It would seem like torture for most, but after you dodge sugar for a long enough period of time, you become hyper-sensitive to the sweetness of most candy.  The taste is almost too much to handle.

Anyone that has gone cold turkey on sugary snacks will no doubt agree with me here.

Screen Shot 2013-03-31 at 10.07.14 PM

 Load up the slingshot, aim at the tank…

You’ve probably read about my mandatory rule of training after nights with friends and during the holidays, when food tends to be a little less nutritious than other times of the year.  It basically involves me torturing myself after a night of excess.  I’m human, it happens.

I have ZERO research to prove that my ability to stay lean over the years has anything to do with these “next day workouts”, but I have to believe that getting up early and grinding through a solid workout has helped to off-set some of the damage.

At the very least, busting through a challenging training session is never a bad thing, right?

Always moving forward, except for holidays.  Then we hover.  🙂

Screen Shot 2013-03-31 at 10.11.09 PM

Time: >30 minutes

Warm-Up:  10-15 minutes

Workout:  10 minutes (up to 15 minutes when scaled to your training level)

Equipment:  Bodyweight and interval timing device of some kind (this one works just fine and it’s free)

Structure:

  1. 10 Squats
  2. 10 Push Ups
  3. 20 Jumping Jacks
  4. 10 Alternating Reverse Lunges (5 each leg)
  5. 10 Burpees (push up + jump)
  6. 20 Jumping Jacks

* Rinse and repeat without rest between exercises or rounds.

** Complete as many rounds as possible in the time frame that you set for yourself.

*** Don’t stop until the clock hits 10 minutes (or longer if you choose).

 

Fitness thoughts

The first thing that I want you to notice about a pure bodyweight workout like this (with no equipment present) is the lack of upper body pulling movements.  For me, no equipment means no pulling.  It’s the sacrifice that you make by using your body mass (and gravity) as the sole source of the training stimulus.  If you have access to something that can be used for chin ups, I would place them after the reverse lunges, or better yet, I would move the push ups after the reverse lunges and have the chin ups be placed immediately after squats.  Vertical pulling is a much more challenging movement for most people, considering you are pulling your full weight with each repetition.  Keeping yourself as fresh a possible before the chin ups will make it a much more enjoyable experience.

Second, attack this workout.  It’s 10 minutes of movement.  There is no reason to leave anything in the tank early on.  This is a variation of short burst training.  Your work output in the allotted time frame will largely determine the training sessions effectiveness.  Your fatigue levels are going to accumulate as the minutes pass by, so get after it and expect your fatigue to peak toward the final minutes of the workout.  Ideally, you’ll experience a large amount of system-wide fatigue around the 8-9 minute mark, leaving you perfectly cooked by the time the beeper sounds.

Third, the jumping jacks are a filler exercise.  They are by far the easiest movement in the workout and this is by design.  The jumping jacks  for a few seconds of active recovery before moving back into the strength based moves.  Don’t dog the jumping jacks.  Get your arms overhead, feet at least shoulder width on the jump and focus on calming your breath from the previous work performed.  Breathe in deep to your belly, and force it out from your belly.  Focus.

Fourth, scale the workout to your abilities.  Don’t be a hero, yet don’t coast.  It’s ten minutes of effort, so if you dog the first five minutes, you’ve lost half of the workout and remained in your comfort zone.  If technique breaks or you are not completing a full range of motion for any movement, well, you need to take a breather until you can complete a full range of motion.

Fifth, warm-up.  I will do a better job of describing what an effective warm up should look like, but in the mean time, this is a variation of a staple warm up for me…

Cheers to Easter bunnies, kangaroos, family and training hard as punishment for eating junk!

 

KG

Do You Know What You’re Eating? Is All “Healthy” Food Healthy?

Food/Eating

After watching yet ANOTHER news story about the recall of the Apple Dippers served at McDonald’s and other fast food restaurants around the country.

Deep breath here…

Do you know what you’re eating?

Not all apples are created equal.  Not all oranges are created equal.  Not all beef is created equal.  Not all lettuce and spinach is created equal.  Not all peanut butter is created equal…

Do you see where I am going with this?

Just because you are buying a “bag of apple slices” from McDonald’s doesn’t mean that they are nutritious or non-toxic.  The red flag should be the fact that they are packaged in a bag and last for months they go rotten.

How long does a pesticide free grown apple last?  A week at the most probably?

You see, you cannot classify all food in the same categories.  I can buy meat from Wal-Mart, but is it the same ground beef that I can buy from a local farm that raises their cows on a free range grass-fed diet?

Absolutely not.

We have to smarten up as consumers.  I know that you want to believe that the cheapest yogurt at the grocery store is just as beneficial as the full fat greek yogurt… but it isn’t.  It’s not even close.

Please make an effort to learn something about what you are putting in your mouth.  I cannot stand to hear the excuse, “The food industry is just so big!  My vote won’t count!”.  Give me a break.  We bitch about so many other pointless issues that we don’t know what we are bitching about anymore.

Food sustains life and if you are eating toxic food, your risk for disease and early death sky rockets.

Try this for a 4 week time period:  Cut out bread and sugar.

The tough part about this challenge is going to be that bread is a habit food and sugar is addictive like cigarettes (this has been studied and proven).  Check my hyper-palatibility post for more information on that craziness.

Alright everyone, I had to write up a quick post before heading to a nutritional conference in Greensboro, NC.  Great things happening down here.  I will share later on…

 

 

KG

Trickery & Timeless One Liners to Help Guide Your Lean Eating

Food/Eating

Anyone who has gotten into a discussion on eating with me knows that I don’t dive into the complicated micronutrients, label reading or hormonal changes that come about with eating different packaged foods.

Quite honestly, after you read so much material about fat loss and eating, you begin to see that everything is connected.  You start to read the same material worded a different way over and over again.  It get’s old, fast.

So, I have found that the best thing we can do for ourselves is STOP COMPLICATING what should be simple.  Eating nutrient dense food shouldn’t be hard.  The problem is that many of us were raised to believe that some of the food that was served at the dinner table was healthy.  There is nothing healthy about Hamburger Helper (Yes I ate it a lot too) or Macaroni and Cheese.

Our view of health food is skewed.  The food industry has done a masterful job at tricking us.

Words and phrases such as:

–  “Natural”

–  “Fat Free”

–  “Sugar Free”

–  “Low Calorie”

–  “Zero Calorie”

–  “Metabolism Boosting”

–  “Farm Fresh”
… are red flags in my world.

As much protein as an egg, and as much sugar as a candy bar.

I rarely walk down the center isles of the grocery store, but if I do, the first thing I notice is how clever the food companies are at tricking us.  It’s a scam all the way around.

So as I mentioned early on in this post, I often throw out a one liner to people who I talk to about nutrition and what they should be eating to see their abdominals once again.  Or, screw seeing your abdominals, some of us should be eating to prolong life and fight disease and a lifetime of hospital bills.  Because that is a reality also.

Here are just a few:

  • If your great grandparents wouldn’t recognize what you’re eating, you shouldn’t eat it.
  • If it has a mother or came from the earth, eat it.
  • Meat:  The less legs the better.
  • “If it’s a plant, eat it. If it was made in a plant, don’t.”  -Michael Pollan
  • “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”  -Michael Pollan

 

*  For the last bullet point, I always recommend adding protein to that recommendation.

I have seen at least 50 or more one liners like this floating around the internet regarding nutritious eating practices.  At first I thought they were gimmicky.  That was until I started throwing them out to people who were asking me if the new 100 calorie bags of popcorn were ok to eat for fat loss, or if Rockstar energy drinks could provide the daily recommended vitamin intake.

Personally I love the look that people give me when I toss out a good quote.  It’s almost as if they expected me to give them a magic bullet or a secret tip.  There are no secrets, remember?

Here is a reminder of that… 

“Well is that how you eat?”, they ask me.

“Yes”, I reply.

Don’t complicate eating.  You have enough stress in your life.  The food you’re jamming down your pie hole doesn’t need to be one of those stresses. Buy some good quality extra virgin olive oil, sea salt, pepper, and get cooking.  Enjoy the experience.

 

-KG-