Hiking For Health

Hiking is just walking on trails, usually trails with topographic variation from hills & mountains. This means that climbing the hill trail makes your heart work harder. The cardiovascular exercise of moderate to high intensity increases heart rate and breathing rate that strengths your arteries, veins, & capillaries, such that aerobic exercise that makes your body sweat, making it hard to speak a few words without taking your next breath, this kind of intense cardio improves the effectiveness and efficiency of your heart, lungs, brain, & vascular system, thus improving overall health & wellness. 

Pain in your feet, ankles, knees or hips, perhaps hiking sounds too painful or intensive if you have been sedentary for a long time and are overweight such that every added pound of body mass puts up to 5 pounds of stress on the feet, ankles, knees & hips. 

For people with pain in the leg & food & hip area, swimming a safer less painful workout because your body has buoyancy when in a pool or body of water, which reduces stress on your feet, ankles, knees and hips. The neutral buoyancy benefit actually better for people who are 10 or 15 or more pounds overweight because fat is lighter than water, meaning overweight people experience additional lifting assist from the pool water or lake or ocean, because the float more effectively because the body fat acts like a lift assist low density tissue. 

Did you know that the human body only has a finite number of fat cells and cannot increase or decrease the number of fat cells. Thus obesity is actually a chronic inflammation disorder caused by carbohydrate, starch, & added sugars typical of UPF or ultra processed foods which are major seller and thus major part of the typical American diet also known as SAD or the Standard American Diet proven to cause obesity, chronic inflammation which caused heart disease, high blood pressure which causes stokes, clotting, and embolisms, and in general makes joint pain worse, such that Ibuprofen and other NSAID's sell really well in America as people take so many kinds of OTC drugs to self medicate the diseases & disorders caused by dietary excess of carbs, starches, and added sugars. 

Ask yourself, what does an artificial ingredient from a UPF food do inside the human body. How about chemical preservatives that make it hard for our gut biome flora to break down UPF foods. The same things added to foods to increase their shelf life to prevent common bugs from spoiling foods on the shelves of stores also make it harder for our gut flora to effectively break down foods that we eat, thus UPF foods are also proven to cause digestive problems and gastric disorders.

What about common pollutants like vehicle exhaust or micro-plastics proven to act as hormone disrupters, what do these synthetic poisons do inside the human body. Does our liver or kidney have enzyme pathways for breakdown golf course herbicides, tiny plastic particles or vehicle pollutant emissions. Do the emissions from a coal power plant harm or help public health? 

The answer is obvious, and you already know that coal power emissions cause public harm, and so the law makers, they understand that coal power hurts the environment and public health, but coal is the cheapest way to make electricity as Firm Power 24/7 with lower capital outlay than large much cleaner & safer nuclear power plant. There are 440 nuclear fission plants making electricity for the public good worldwide. Nuclear the newest, safest, lowest emission, cleanest way of making electricity on the Terawatt scale and nuclear 4th Gen. breeder reactors using today technology make use of 96% of the fuel element energy, meaning less nuclear waste to handle carefully. 

Back to hiking, walking, jogging or running for health, fitness, exercise or activities that are good for your overall health and wellness. Did you know that working out can improve your emotional health and improve your outlook on life, making you feel better all the time. Regular exercise also improves the joy from sex and the restorative healing aspects of higher quality sleep. Exercising regularly makes food taste better, as any hiker knows that eating a snack at the top of the trail after working really hard and sweaty to get there, tastes even better as a sweet enjoyable snack. Many hikers bring a bag of nuts, seeds and dry fruit and a large bottle of clean water to eat & drink in order to replenish that which is expelled, such that we loose water in our breath and via sweating, but also because staying well hydrated effective for preventing kidney damage and promoting good brain health. 

Many elderly people for example have dementia from eating too many western ultra processed foods and never exercising enough to keep their blood glucose levels balanced in a good optimal range between 70 and 180. Chronically elevated high blood sugars above 180 are neurotoxic and cause kidney damage & dehydration. Every extra carb like sugar in the body, can cling onto water and keep the water form critical cell processes, such that if you carb load by eating a lot of bread, rice, pasta, jam, candy, soda, or other starchy carbs and do not move enough by bicycling, walking, hiking or doing fitness exercises like HIIT, then those added sugars, starch and carbs will cause your blood sugar to stay elevated at a dangerous high level. 

Glucose toxicity from high fructose corn syrup, added sugars, modified starches or excess simple carbohydrates, really arrises from too much of that kind of food in a meal. Food serving sizes are widely misunderstood and its known in the food industry that a person drinking soda with HFCS can eat 40% before feeling full from leptin signaling, as leptin is the Full Feeling Hormone that the body releases at the end of a meal to make us feel satiated so we stop eating. Many food additives block Leptin Full Feeling Hormone release and promote the release or Ghrelin the "Hunger Promoting Hormone" that makes people seek out eating or hungry in the first place. 

A healthy lifestyle consists of mental health, feeling connected to other people with healthy relationships, having something to look forward too, a balanced amount of health activities to provide 150 min per week of moderate to intense make the body hot and sweaty level fitness exercises. I use the Meta Quest 2 VR headset when its cold and rainy, to exercise using the Les Mills Body Combat App, a $400 solution with the Upgrades head strap battery, that gets my heart rate up into the target heart rate zone enough to cause full body sweating profusely as I punch digital targets out of the air synchronized to music in the different workouts that range from 4 to 24 minutes in length. I tend to pick 8 to 15 min activities of enough intensity that I only wear underwear and do it in private inside my home where others cannot look upon me while I am doing it, since I have a prudish desire to not be seen in such reveling clothing or what other people call modesty. My parents were not modest and did not shy away from showing their raw human body without clothing and told me not to be ashamed to be naked at home and to love the body that God gave me unconditionally. There was something that did not sit right with me about our neighbors seeing me naked. I just never liked being around other people without clothing and tend to be a private person with a high value placed on privacy and security. 

Yes I know the NSA project PRISM is listening to my blog, texts, smart devices, everything connected to the internet is a spy portal for government to listen in inside you home so they know everything about you from what you talk about at home. I talk out loud while writing these blog posting, mostly to make sure it sounds like my real world voice, but lovely wife also helps to improve my writing by giving me edifying advice and editing suggesting in real time as I write these posting by hand on the keyboards of one of my computers. 

Admittedly I am a little bit zealous about internet connected devices, online activities, blogging, running my YouTube channel, posting to X or what was previously called Twitter, and writing blog posting as my friends from past FaceBook interactions noted that I have a lot of share, in terms of educational ideas to help other people, motivated to give them powerful facts like TED videos, so they can ponder the bright ideas and integrate them into their lives as healthy lifestyle improvement, like choosing to go for a walk after dinner, after reading this article, for example. 

My late adoptive father Ken Schwarz told me to make my point in 30 seconds or less, otherwise I will lose most people who can't focus much longer than that as ADD and ADHD are on the rise from TV commercial content interruptions that break peoples focus when they are watching shows. I spent a lot of time drink beer with my adoptive father watching Modern Marvels & How its Made videos on TV, and we would mute the TV and talk about what we were watching. This is because I lived with my parents until I was almost 30, helping to pick up the slack as their live in care taker as their abilities and fitness declined for the reasons I outlined previously, namely Junk Food Jockeys who never exercised. I am a bit of a Fitness Focused person afraid of being overweight. Moreover I just wanted to avoid all the health declines, diseases and disorders that come along with chronic inflammation from being morbidly obese. I am not judging anyone and only trying too help others people understand that Obesity and Hearty Disease are intimately connected as chronic inflammation disorders that are leading causes of early preventable death worldwide, even more than all cancers combined. 

Heart Disease the Big Killer of people and my goal in teaching people about nutrition or fitness is help them avoid nutrition traps that are so easy to miss or not understand. Confusion about healthy nutrition and proper serving sizes abounds because the commercial processed food industry makes $4 trillion in profits annually in America, and spends large portions of that immense profit marking highly profitable highly processed artificial industrial junk food garbage called UPF to people who crave Oreo Cookies, Coca Cola and other food like substance that are potent to destroy oral health and damage peoples metabolism. I have given you a lot to think about here in this posting, so if you would be so kind, if you any suggestions or advice, please leave a comment and consider coming back for more of this kind of deep dive information designed to free others people with powerful facts also called Truth that are scientifically accurate, axioms if you will, based on best understanding in medicine and physiology integrating what I learned about Toxicology and Environmental Science in College.