How polyphenols can help your health, recovery & performance and the best foods to get them from.
Polyphenols are a compound present in various fruits, vegetables, teas, coffee, herbs/spices, honey etc. (this is one of the many benefits of consuming various fruits and veggies: Are Fruit And Vegetables Really That Important?).
You may have heard about specific kinds of polyphenols like ‘resveratrol’ and ‘curcumin’ and their touted health benefits (good for your heart health and having powerful anti-inflammatory effects), but there are many more – more than 8000 have been identified!
Many of these have been studied and discovered to have their own associated health benefits, but lets discuss them as a whole and how these compounds are advantageous for your health and fitness pursuits.
The majority of polyphenols (90-95%) that you consume through the various foods mentioned above end up in your colon (this is where most of your gut microbes are). Once here, a number of processes take place such as the increase of ‘good’ and decrease of ‘bad’ microbes that reside in your gut and the transformation of polyphenols into other compounds that have beneficial effects around the body. (1)
These processes that take place in the gut result in anticancer, anti-bacterial, anti-inflammatory benefits; the prevention of fat tissue generation and also brain-protective benefits. (1)
So, overall they have been shown to be very beneficial for your health and aid in the prevention of various diseases like cancer, diabetes, brain degeneration and cardiovascular diseases.
Other than the obvious benefit of how good health is a crucial component of fitness success, polyphenols really shine in their ability to help regulate inflammation, oxidative stress and your immune system.
Inflammation is an important process for repairing your muscles, having a well functioning immune system and so on, so it isn’t ‘bad’ when it is under control and doing its all-important job.
However, say you’ve been training really hard, you’re fatigued/stressed and/or you’re fighting off an illness, the levels of inflammation can begin to rise too high which will affect your ability to recover, perform and can also be bad for your health.
This is where the power of polyphenols come in.
Their ability to reduce inflammation and interact with the immune system means that you get improved recovery (muscle strength and soreness), reduced damaging effects of high inflammation and even help restoring your immune system, which can become weakened during these periods of high training/stressors. (2) (3)
So they help your recovery and make sure your immune system is functioning well, but can they do anything for your physical performance?
A meta-analysis concluded that polyphenol supplementation results in an improvement in performance (with no side effects). There was a slightly greater improvement when the polyphenol was quercertin which is found in apples, onions, tea, citrus fruits, olive oil, dark berries etc. (4)
There are a few ways they may be exerting beneficial effects, but one of the main ways is likely their vasodilatory effects. This essentially means more blood can get to your working muscles which improves performance!
The average intake of polyphenols in the studies which showed benefit was 688mg a day. They mentioned that this could be achieved through consuming 200g of dark chocolate, 250ml of green tea and 300g of mixed berries. (4)
Other papers mentioned 300-500mg of certain polyphenols 1-2 hours before exercise will improve performance and 1000mg a day for 3 or more days will help recovery after muscle injury. (2)
Simply increase your intake of polyphenol-rich foods in your diet!
Getting your polyphenols from food sources is going to be superior because they work well together with the other compounds and nutrients present in the food (it also encourages an overall healthier diet).
You do have to include enough of the foods in a decent quantity to get adequate amounts of polyphenols for the benefits, but if you’re consuming a wide range of these health- and fitness-promoting foods in your diet you should be able to get enough.
• Spices and dried herbs
Perez-Jilmenez et al. made a list of the 100 richest sources of polyphenols, this was the top 10 per 100g/100ml:
(5)
Now, there are probably easier and more efficient ways of consuming high amounts of polyphenols besides consuming 100g of cloves or dried peppermint (unless you really love cloves and dried peppermint!). This is where dark berries and beverages like coffee and tea are more effective for consuming high quantities of polyphenols. It’s much easier to eat 100g+ of dark berries (black elderberries, blackcurrant, blueberries, sweet cherry etc.) or 200ml of coffee/teas, so those foods would be more effective at providing you with greater quantities of polyphenols. (5)
Either way, incorporating more of these polyphenol rich foods is going to be an effective way of gaining the many benefits they have to offer!
This could be as simple as having a coffee (or two) (Coffee, good or bad for health and fitness?) and a protein smoothie that has a mix of dark berries and cacao powder an hour before your training session. Then, throughout the day you could include lots of herb and spices in your meals, snack on some nuts and seeds, use extra virgin olive oil and generally eat more fruits and veggies.
Including a large amount of polyphenol-rich foods and beverages like dark berries, dark chocolate/cacao, herbs/spices, coffee, olives/olive oil and teas in your diet is a great way to leverage the power of polyphenols in helping you stay healthy, recover better and it may even give you a performance boost too!
3. Gorzynik-Debicka, Monika et al. “Potential Health Benefits of Olive Oil and Plant Polyphenols.” International journal of molecular sciences vol. 19,3 686. 28 Feb. 2018, doi:10.3390/ijms19030686
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