MARK TEIXEIRA REINVENTS HIMSELF...AGAIN

According to YES Network's Yankees Hot Stove, Mark Teixeira always looks to reinvent himself in some way during the off season.  One year he decided to overdo it with the amount of early swings he took, which eventually took its toll on his wrist.  Last year, he did a little broadcasting stint called Foul Territory.  This year, he is gluten-free, sugar-free and dairy-free and he feels brand new.

"Teixeira, who turns 35 in April, hasn't played more than 123 games since that 2011 season but thinks that with his new diet he will cut down on the inflammation in his body. He said he will use the diet, which consists of no bread and a lot of buffalo meat, the rest of his playing career. He said he reconfigured his body, adding 13 pounds of muscle, while losing fat," reports ESPN.com this week.  YES Network Hot Stove put it this way, "The Yankees don't care what Teixeira eats; they just want him to hit more balls over the fence."  What if I said, going gluten-free could actually help him do that.

According to an article in the Washington Post, "Nutritionally speaking, gluten is useless,” according to Alessio Fasano, director of the Center for Celiac Research at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children. “It doesn’t do anything for us,” he says. “For the [first] 99.9 percent of our human evolution, our species has been gluten-free.” The protein entered our diets only about 10,000 years ago, when our ancestors began domesticating crops, he says. As a result, our bodies don’t contain the digestive enzymes to break it down. Eating a lot of gluten is akin to “asking your GI system to do an impossible mission: to digest something that’s not digestible,” says Fasano, a pediatric gastroenterologist.

I have been 95% gluten-free since June and the after effects are amazing.  I sleep better, run better and I have more energy.  It has helped my running splits, my endurance and my metabolism.  

"After gaining a reputation of being unpredictable, prone to sickness and even out of shape — something that commentators often blamed on asthma — Djokovic went gluten-free in 2010. The next year, he won 10 tennis titles, three Grand Slam events and 43 consecutive matches. He’s now ranked No. 1 in the world by the Association of Tennis Professionals. “My life had changed because I had begun to eat the right foods for my body, in the way that my body demanded,” he writes.

So, will changing his diet really help Mark Teixeira perform at a higher level? "If everything is working as it should, then your immune system can ‘clean up’ those undigested fragments of gluten, and everything is fine. But eliminating gluten frees the body from this dead-end mission, allowing it to focus on carrying oxygen to the muscles. This, some theorize, is why eliminating gluten may boost athletic performance."  According to ESPN, "Teixeira's belief in his new diet and renewed weightlifting program makes him believe that he can stay fully healthy for the first time since 2011. If he does, Teixeira thinks he can be a 30-homer and 100-RBI player again."

I really hope that Teixeira's new health regiment helps him and it's not just another one of his stints to reinvent himself.  We really need him to hit and to bring an energy burst to our team.  If he sticks with it, going gluten-free can positively affect your life.  Stay with it, Mark.  I'm with you!

--Suzie Pinstripe, BYB Senior Staff Writer
BYB Hot Stove Columnist
Twitter: @suzieprof



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