BY STEVE BORN
If you look at the Premium Insurance Caps page on the Hammer Nutrition website, you’ll see the words “Start here.” If you were to surmise, “I guess that means, of all the supplements they make, this is the one I should start with,” you would be 100% correct. But why? With all the great and exciting supplements we make—Fully Charged, Anti-Fatigue Caps, Race Day Boost, Race Caps Supreme—why do we recommend that you start with Premium Insurance Caps?
The reason is, while Fully Charged, Anti-Fatigue Caps, and other supplements in the Hammer Nutrition line may arguably have a bit more direct impact on improving athletic performance, if you’re not covering your basic nutrient needs (vitamins and minerals), your health and athletic performance will suffer, and those other products won’t ever realize their full value.
In my 20+ years at Hammer Nutrition, I’ve found that most people don’t take a multivitamin/mineral supplement for two main reasons:
1. They believe they already eat a healthy diet.
2. They believe multivitamins are boring and won’t do anything to boost athletic performance.
The first reason is incorrect; it is virtually impossible to obtain all the nutrients your body requires from your daily diet. There are three main reasons for this:
1. Studies show that food alone may not supply all the micronutrients we need to prevent deficiency, let alone achieve optimal health.
2. Much of our diet comes from foods grown far away, picked when unripe, and then shipped. Nutritional content is questionable and usually depleted.
3. Even if we could obtain all the nutrients we need from our diet, it's unlikely that any of us eat an ideal diet consistently.
Not only do we not obtain enough nutrients from our diet to promote optimal health, many of us do not even eat enough quality food to meet the minimal Reference Daily Intake (RDI) or Daily Value (DV) micronutrient requirements for preventing deficiency-related disorders.
The research of distinguished nutritional scientist Bruce Ames, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, presents a hypothesis that implies micronutrient deficiency may eventually deteriorate the quality of whole human cell health. A portion of Professor Ames' abstract reads as follows:
“Inadequate dietary intakes of vitamins and minerals are widespread, most likely due to excessive consumption of energy-rich, micronutrient-poor, refined food. Inadequate intakes may result in chronic metabolic disruption, including mitochondrial decay. Deficiencies in many micronutrients cause DNA damage, such as chromosome breaks, in cultured human cells or in vivo. Some of these deficiencies also cause mitochondrial decay with oxidant leakage and cellular aging and are associated with late onset diseases such as cancer.”*
So when someone tells you that you can get all the nutrients you need from a healthy diet, keep the sobering words of Dr. Ames in mind.
As far as the second reason for not taking a multivitamin/mineral supplement—they’re boring and won’t make me faster—think about it a bit more: If you’re not covering your nutrient needs—and it’s pretty clear that very few are, especially athletes—you increase the potential for a number of negative athletic performance and health issues. At the very least, this means you won't get the full value from all the hard work you put into your training because your body won’t have the nutrient support it needs to fully recover. It could also very well result in a compromised immune system, which is definitely something to avoid since that could translate into missed training days due to illness.
That’s why, after hundreds upon hundreds of supplement program consultations I’ve done during my tenure at Hammer Nutrition, I unhesitatingly recommend starting your supplement program with Premium Insurance Caps. Along with your efforts to consume the healthiest diet possible, daily use of Premium Insurance Caps will ensure you’re getting ideal amounts of vitamins, minerals, and key auxiliary nutrients—not minimal and insignificant Daily Value or Reference Daily Intake amounts but Optimal Daily Intake amounts that will have a noticeably positive impact on your health. That strong nutrient foundation is a primary key to your body being able to meet the challenge of increased training volume and workload, and that translates into improved athletic performance and better overall health.
Premium Insurance Caps. Start here. You’ll be glad you did. We guarantee it.
*Ames B. Low micronutrient intake may accelerate the degenerative diseases of aging through allocation of scarce micronutrients by triage. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. 2006 Nov 21; 103 (47): 17589-94.
