How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolution with Polyphenols

If you’re like most people, staying motivated with your New Year’s resolutions can be difficult. So before anyone gets too far off track, we wanted to provide you with a solution to make your New Year’s resolutions stick!

For your health-focused resolutions, focusing on adding more polyphenols to your diet is going to be your key to success. 

Here’s why:

Polyphenols help you maintain focus

Keeping focused is one of the most difficult parts of upholding our resolutions. So step one to keeping any resolution is keeping your brain clear and focused. 

Studies have shown multiple beneficial effects of polyphenols on brain health. Some of these brain benefits include:

• Improved mood
• Reduced anxiety
• Easier learning
• Better information retention
• Increase expression of neurotrophic factors — linked to better brain performance and focus
• Improved synaptic function — signals are sent easier from the brain throughout the body
• Adult brains suffered from less neurodegeneration and related diseases

If you’re looking to perform better at work, school, or with your new business side hustle or you’re just looking to stay focused on your fitness goals polyphenols are great for this. 

Foods that can provide you with these brain-enhancing polyphenols include:

• Nuts
• Seeds
• Avocados
• Berries
• Green, leafy vegetables

Polyphenols are great for your skin

A lot of us focus on our appearances for our resolutions and your skin health might be your biggest concern. Polyphenols can help.

Oftentimes you see polyphenols being referred to as the “fountain of youth” with their age-fighting properties. So if you’re looking to reduce your fine lines, age spots, or wrinkles polyphenols can be the answer (topically or ingested).

If you’re suffering from the dreaded “mascne” (acne caused by wearing masks), polyphenols might be the answer. 

• Green tea polyphenols were found to help fight acne vulgaris. 
• While polyphenols from turmeric were found to help fight acne, psoriasis, and several other skin conditions. 

Polyphenols could be your sure way to having healthy, beautiful, and radiant skin this year. Spend some of your social distancing time whipping up plant-based concoctions to see if it helps give your skin your desired glow.

Polyphenols help to stop cravings when dieting

One of the biggest things that throw you off track with your dieting resolution is cravings. You want those sweet or salty snacks that you know aren’t good for you, but you want them SO bad anyway. 

Our gut microbiomes are actually to blame for this. If you have an unhealthy balance of bacteria in your gut, the bad bacteria will cause you to experience cravings. Sugar has actually been found to have similar effects on our bodies and brains as addictive drugs do. 

Sugar causes cravings, binge-eating, withdrawal, and specific opioid release when sugar is ingested. 

When we eat healthy foods that feed our good gut bacteria, our bodies can fight the addictions and cravings.

Probiotics help to balance out the types of bacteria. 

Foods that are considered prebiotics (like those in Atrantil) feed the good bacteria so they can replicate and add their own probiotics to your gut. During this process, metabolites are released that can help to calm the addictive reactions our brains experience. So instead of asking for more of the bad things, they realize that your body is either content or needs something that is healthy. 

Researchers are actually looking to use polyphenols for drug addiction patients to see if reshaping their gut microbiomes can help with their recovery.

Polyphenols enhance your muscle performance and recovery

Are you looking to fight some fat or bulk up your muscles this new year? Polyphenols can help with that too. If you’re starting to exercise more (especially if your body had gotten used to binge-watching TV shows for days on end during the quarantine), then you’re likely going to be sore. 

Polyphenols have been shown to help reduce the post-workout discomfort you feel and improve muscle recovery so you aren’t sore for near as long.

Polyphenols are also great for helping your body to intake oxygen at better levels. If your local gym is mandating you to wear a mask while working out, this is essential to your health. Your brain and lungs need proper oxygen flow to maintain homeostasis so if it isn’t getting as much as it needs while you’re exercising you’re at a higher risk of going unconscious. 

You can learn more about the benefits of polyphenols for enhanced exercise performance in our article here.

Polyphenols have been linked to lowering risk factors for multiple diseases

This is where polyphenols really shine and where plant-based diet benefits come into play. If we look at diets like:

•  The Mediterranean diet
• The MIND diet
• DASH diets 

we see that they are extremely high in plant-derived foods which all offer us polyphenols. 

The MIND diet was created to help reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease and the DASH diet was created to help lower blood pressure and associated diseases. Both menus consist of high quantities of polyphenols.

Some of the diseases or health-related issues that polyphenols can help reduce or alleviate include:

• High blood pressure
• Cardiovascular disease
• Atherosclerosis
• Certain cancers
• Gastrointestinal disorders
• Alzheimer’s disease
• Diabetes
• High cholesterol

Polyphenols can help you lose weight AND keep it off

Fighting cravings is one of the biggest parts here, but if you’re really looking to maintain that weight you’ve kept off then keep eating and drinking your polyphenols. 

Both green and black tea polyphenols have been shown to help reduce belly fat and improve metabolism. Foods that have high protein and polyphenolic content like nuts and seeds are great at helping your body feel full and avoid overeating. 

Polyphenols of all kinds can help you to achieve any and all of your health-focused resolutions this new year! Let us know what your resolutions are in the comments below! :)

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