During exercise your metabolism generates not only energy from glucose with the mitochondria of your muscle cells, but also a by-product known as free radicals.  These are small oxygenated molecules that have only one purpose in their short life:  to grab electrons from their nearest neighbor and in so doing, destroy them.  Hence, muscle cells are destroyed and have to be replaced.

In addition to free radical oxidative damage, tissues such as your joints, tendons and ligaments can become damaged during hard exercise and competitive performance. This initiates the inflammatory response of the immune system leading to swelling, inflammation and pain. A certain amount of inflammation occurs with most exercise, although it is not always noticeable.

The first benefit of organic cocoa is its high antioxidant content(1).  It contains more flavanoids than highly antioxidant foods such as blueberries and tea(2), and can be used by more than  just athletes seeking to reduce the oxidative stress initiate by training and competition. Antioxidants destroy free radicals on sight – in fact as soon as they are formed. Not only do they prevent the oxidative stress of exercise, but they also prevent atherosclerosis, where free radicals render low density lipoproteins water-insoluble so that they precipitate from the blood and form cholesterol plaques on arterial walls.

With regard to exercise and recovery, however, the antioxidants in organic cocoa prevent damage to muscle cells and the proteins that form muscle tissue. The same phytochemicals also possess anti-inflammatory properties, and so help to reduce the effects of inflammation. It is ironic that the inflammatory response of your immune system is intended to protect your body tissues from damage, but doesn’t know when to stop and ends up causing swelling and pain. Anti-inflammatories are used to alleviate the effects of inflammation that can retard recovery after exercise. Experimental evidence indicates that organic cocoa contains powerful anti-inflammatory effects(3).

Another benefit of organic cocoa is that it can promote cardiovascular health. By dilating your arteries and other blood vessels it can improve blood flow, and hence help to maintain muscle oxygenation during exercise.  This in turn not only permits longer and more effective athletic performance, but also helps to convert exercise into more powerful muscle density. It regulates your hear rate and lowers your blood pressure, and generally promotes athletic prowess and effective exercise.

Another benefit that is not truly appreciated is offered by the neurotransmitter content of cocoa. Remember that great feeling you get after jogging a few miles?  Referred to as ‘jogger’s high’ it can be provided by the endorphin content of organic cocoa. Endorphins are ‘feel-good’ neurotransmitters and cocoa, in providing that plus others such as serotonin promote a positive outlook and a general feeling of well being.

These attitudes are important to athletes, and another that cocoa offers is anandamine, a chemical released by the brain that promotes relaxation and enables you to relax easier after extreme exercise, thus promoting more rapid recovery. Finally, phenylethylamine helps you to focus on the objective in hand, and together with the other neurotransmitters that cocoa either contains or promotes in the brain, can put you in the right mood for hard work and athletic achievement and improve the symptoms of fatigue, particularly of chronic fatigue(4).

1. British Journal of Nutrition (2009), 101, 931-940

2. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Dec 3, 2003.

3. J Cardiovasc Pharmacol. 2006;47 Suppl 2:S163-71; discussion S172-6.

4. Endocrine Abstracts (2006) 12 P68

Copyright 2010 LifeHealthSecrets

If you want to lose fat, then it’s important to know under what conditions fat cells multiply, grow ‘fatter’ or shrink. Yes, fat cells can get fatter also. They are the cells responsible for storing the unused calories you consume, so the more calories and less exercise, the larger they will get. What’s more, when a fat cell grows fat enough (3 to 6 times its original size), it multiplies. These new cells, in turn, can get fatter.

But it’s not only eating a high-calorie diet that affects fat cell size. Think about it. If this were the only factor, then there wouldn’t be any of those ‘I can eat as much as I want but I don’t gain weight’ people out there. Teenagers and their enormous appetites wouldn’t exist. So what else affects our fat cells? Cellular health. Our cells fatten up when their cellular receptor sites become congested with chemicals found in the foods we eat and the environment all around us. This prevents nutrients from coming into the cell and waste from going out. This in turn affects your cellular metabolism (also called cellular respiration) – your cells produce less and less energy. Both ATP production and the cellular charge are affected. As you can imagine, it just gets worse from here. Think of how you would feel if you couldn’t excrete your body wastes daily, but had to hold it all in. This is what goes on at a micro level, in your cells. They literally start to ferment in their own waste.

What’s worse is that if your cells are impaired enough, even a normal caloric intake can cause fat cells to grow – so you could be eating a sensible diet and still get fat. That’s just plain unfair.

How do we reverse this process? Basically, we need to get the energy production of the cell back up, get cellular respiration/metabolism back up, so that the cells can start burning excess stored energy, generating internal heat, and expelling waste efficiently again. To get cellular respiration up you need proper cell charge. To get cell charge up you need to supply and move electrons throughout your body.  The purpose of  Protein Extreme Energy is to supply and move electrons, get cellular charge back up to its optimum levels, and cleanse cellular receptor sites – this is the foundation of good cellular health. GSH-Ignite would be the next step, working to balance oxidative and reductive systems, and therefore increase cellular respiration, all the while protecting against premature aging caused by free radicals (for a more in-depth look at how at how your body produces energy). The end result? Healthy, high-functioning cells that can ‘breathe’ properly, setting the stage for sustainable weight loss.

Alix Thelemaque

Madeleine Thomas

Copyright 2009 LifeHealthSecrets