Improved recovery for athletes

Here is an interesting PDF presentation on improving recovery from inflammation for athletes. Most likely, anti-inflammatory foods and pro-inflammatory foods will have the same impact for non-athletes. Here are a few take-aways from the the presentation:
Those who doubled their fresh fruit and vegetable intake had 10 to 15% more anti-oxidant power in their blood. p14
Increasing the amount and variety of vegetables is key. p.7
Whole Foods are more effective than supplements most of the time p.8 (Some supplements show a higher mortality p.10)
Some anti-oxidants are pro-oxidants in different situations p.11
Best spices according to the ORAC (antioxidant) scale: cloves, cinnamon, oregano, tumeric, parsley, basil, cumin (all dried!) and unsweetened cocoa powder. p12
Raisins have a higher anti-oxidant capacity than blueberries. p. 17
Coconut oil is 91% saturated fat! [yuck! The American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiologists recently recommended cutting previous Saturated fat intake recommendations to half of the previous guidelines; note that the Canadian health authorities haven’t updated their recommendation in many years]*.
Displace bad fats with mono-unsaturated oils: avocado, olive, peanut or canola.
Avoid refined sugars (p. 18)

So you can see, there are a lot of good nuggets in the presentation. Here’s the full document for your interest:
http://www.humankinetics.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/124/Culinary_Recovery_webinar.pdf

* According to Martijn Katan (emertius professor of nutrition at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) in Nutrition Action Health Newsletter, May 2014 p. 1, 3. He’s one of the people who first raised alarm bells about trans-fats.

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