Your body is a high-performance vehicle
Perhaps one of Dr Huk’s most well-known presentations is that which explains how our bodies are like a performance car. The highly-visual presentation uses an image of a car – with its body and four wheels – to represent a person, to show how each wheel needs to be working in tune with the other three in order for the car to drive to the best of its capability.
Dr Huk says, “Imagine our body is a “Tesla”, and the engine is nitric oxide. We take nitric oxide for granted as it is our body, but we need to charge it, to replenish it and look after it. We cannot take nitric oxide as a standalone supplement, as it is a gas, but we can tune the four wheels to make sure that they look after the engine.”
Those four wheels are Vitamin D3, Vitamin K2, Calcium and L-arginine + L-Citrulline.
Dr Huk continues, “These four wheels must work together, they must all be carefully maintained in order for the engine – the nitric oxide – to work as it should. And we all need nitric oxide to work as it should! If we are doing physical work, our nitric oxide is depleted, and we feel exhausted. But it is depleted by more cerebral work too. And let’s remember, people are working harder, they’re taking in more information than ever before. You can’t switch off your brain! Wherever we look, our brains are taking in more information, from our smart phones, from our computers, from wherever we are looking. It is exhausting!”
Take care of your ‘car’
“I always try to explain simply; I’m passing on fundamental knowledge.”
Dr Huk does not subscribe to the modern theory that stress is an inevitable by-product of a busy life, with his findings showing that we can ‘override’ stress with careful analysis of the supplements that our bodies need, namely these ‘four wheels’ so that our performance cars can drive. But he is keen to point out that having a stressful life and taking supplements is not enough; we have a responsibility to ourselves to take care of our cars. With regular exercise, healthy eating, reducing alcohol consumption and reducing unnecessary stress all encouraged by Dr Huk, his metaphor of a performance car becomes even more powerful.
After all, how many of us take more care of our cars – taking it to the car wash, topping up with petrol, checking the tire pressure… – than we do our own bodies?
DID YOU KNOW?
You can ‘run away’ stress! 30% of health is physical exercise.
Nitric Oxide Congress, Florida, USA, 1994
Right to left: Ihor Huk and his wife, Robert Furchgott with his wife, Josef Nanobashvili.
Robert Francis Furchgott was a Nobel Prize-winning American biochemist who contributed to the discovery of nitric oxide as a transient cellular signal in mammalian systems