1 Ingredient Destroys Heart Health Benefits of Exercising

You know that exercising is heart healthy. It lowers cholesterol and blood pressure and reduces your risk of heart attack and stroke.

BUT!

According to a new study in the journal Genes and Nutrition, if you consume one very common ingredient (and you definitely do), then all that hard work is for nothing.

Absolutely nothing!

The authors used rats and divided them into four groups:

1. One group exercised while enjoying their normal diet.

2. One group exercised while being fed plenty of fructose.

3. One group had their normal diet without exercise.

4. The last group had a high fructose diet without exercise.

The rats were euthanized after eight weeks so the researchers could collect tissue from their quadriceps muscles and blood samples.

They used the quadriceps tissue to measure the expression of 19 genes that facilitate the muscle’s effective responses to exercise.

They used the blood samples to measure the levels of triglycerides (fats), insulin, insulin sensitivity, and glucose.

Following the collection of these data they found the following:

1. The body weight of the exercising group without fructose was the lowest, while the weights of both the fructose groups were the highest.

2. Both fructose-consuming groups had higher triglyceride levels than the non-fructose groups.

3. Both exercise groups showed an improved level of physical conditioning.

4. Both fructose groups experienced an impairment in the expression of the genes PGC-1α, FNDC5, NR4A3, GLUT4, Atg9, Lamp2, Ctsl, Murf-1, and MAFBx/Atrogin-1 in their skeletal muscles.

5. These are the genes that control our muscles’ response to exercise. They help our muscles use glucose for energy, they determine our muscles’ sensitivity to insulin, they help our muscles regenerate and grow after exercise, they help to remove damaged proteins from our muscles, and so forth.

All this seems to suggest that high amounts of fructose can undermine the effectiveness of an exercise program and thereby prevent it from saving us from diabetes and heart disease.

It is also a lesson for sporty people who exercise a lot, believing that they can then eat whatever they please. This is clearly not true.

In those cases, exercise will lead to a good level of physical conditioning, but it will not keep their body weight or triglycerides at a healthy level, their muscles will struggle to regenerate and grow, and their muscles will become insulin resistant and will struggle to use energy.

If you love fruit, which also contains fructose, you don’t have to worry. The levels at which the rats consumed fructose in this study can be reached only through the consumption of refined sugars, for example, high fructose corn syrup.

Therefore, allow your exercise program to keep your heart healthy by avoiding sodas, sports drinks, sweetened yogurt, flavored milk, canned fruits, fruit juice, salad dressing, powdered seasoning, sauces, canned soup, breakfast cereal and cereal bars, most candies and granola bars, jam, peanut butter, ice cream, and anything else in which high fructose corn syrup is listed as an ingredient.

If you have high cholesterol, discover how I normalized mine and cleared out my 93 percent clogged arteries by cutting out ONE ingredient (not fructose) that you probably don’t even realize you’re consuming…

And if you have high blood pressure, try these three easy exercises that drop blood pressure below 120/80—as soon as today…