Travel, especially to international destinations, is currently limited for most of us. However, whether you’re doing some local travel, engaging in social-distanced outdoor activities, or on complete lockdown, we are all eager to return to travel the way we knew it. The US travel association recently collated numerous polls that show that most travelers miss flying and would fly to anywhere right now, as long as it was safe. Unfortunately, the reality is that travel has changed and could remain changed for a long time. We may no longer be able to just get up and go without taking some pre-travel health precautions.
Prior to the pandemic, travelers traveled with less emphasis on the health risks associated with travel. Most people felt comfortable going to a destination as long as they’ve been vaccinated against the diseases prevalent in that location or could get proper treatment if they were to fall sick while on the go. As more information about the pandemic emerges, we now realize that being healthy and boosting our immune system prior to travel is as important as what we do during travel if we want a healthier and safer journey. Even when the pandemic becomes history, travelers will inevitably put more emphasis on how much risk the entire process of traveling poses to their health. The higher the risk, the lower the desire to travel, and vice versa.
Nutrition has always made a big difference in our overall travel experience. How and what we eat determines how healthy we are before, during, and after our travels. It determines how strongly we can fight off germs. Now more than ever, it is important that we eat clean and right to be able to safely travel in the near future. We need to fortify our body’s defense mechanism by keeping the body as clean as possible. We also need to be mindful of what goes into our body and follow a few tips to incorporate clean eating into our daily routine.
There are many reasons why clean eating is important for a safer and healthier travel, however, here are the top seven:
1. Improve Longevity and Increase Your Travel Years
Avid travelers often get a high from planning their next trip, and the time between those trips is often filled with excitement and anticipation of the pleasure of the upcoming trip. When we plan our next trip, we often assume we’ll be able to make that trip, and the next, and the next. We create bucket list destinations we plan to check off over the years. Planning every next trip can be exhilarating and rewarding, however, we should also work towards keeping our body in the best shape to improve our chances of longevity and more quality travel years.
Clean eating plays a major role in longevity. A recent Harvard clinical study shows that men and women who maintained a healthy lifestyle including eating a healthy diet were 82% less likely to die from heart disease and 65% less likely to die from cancer compared to those who lead less healthy lifestyles over a 30-year period. The study also showed that adopting healthy lifestyles that included eating right, added 14 more years of life to women, and 12 more years of life to men - more healthy years that could certainly help with checking off that travel list and keeping us traveling longer and better.
2. Be Healthier and Improve Your Travel Experience
Clean eating not only adds more years to our lives but it also adds more quality years. Eating clean requires eating minimally processed foods as well as foods as close to nature as possible. When you eat clean, you typically cut out sugar, eat more greens, eat whole foods, fill up on protein, eat natural foods, focus on plants and vegetables, reduce refined carbohydrates, load up on nutritionally-dense foods, and avoid calorie-laden drinks. You also read labels before consuming any product to make sure you know what you’re ingesting. By filtering what we eat and only consuming healthy and natural foods, we keep our body clean and protected from chemicals that can cause havoc to our health.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, a poor diet is associated with major health risks, infections, and diseases. Being healthy during our travels is extremely important. Often times, we are so pumped with travel adrenaline that we forget that travel in itself, can be stressful, especially international travel. We are constantly on the move as we navigate booking our flights, making accommodation arrangements, packing our luggage, getting to the airport, completing the check-in process, transits, layovers, and finally getting to our final destination. Unfortunately, our body takes a tremendous beating as we go through the travel process and if our nutrition is not optimal, our body is often not strong enough to withstand the rigors of travel and we could spend the first few days, if not all our vacation time, being miserably sick. Even travel-related problems like motion sickness are more likely to occur when we don’t eat clean. It is certainly normal to be tired and exhausted during travel, it is, however, not the norm to start our vacation sick. By eating clean and keeping our body in the best shape possible, we are often able to shake off the tiredness quickly, avoid being sick, and enjoy our vacation as planned.
3. Fight Off Jetlag A Little Easier for A Better Travel Time
Jetlag, also called jet lag disorder, is a temporary sleep problem that affects travelers due to a disturbance in our internal body clock. Unfortunately, jetlag is an unpleasant part of travel that most of us have to deal with. Symptoms of jet lag include disturbed sleep, inability to focus, tiredness, and daytime irritability. The American Sleep Association projects that nearly 93% of all travelers will experience jet lag at some point. Typically, it takes the body one day per time zone crossed to fully recover. If you’re crossing several time zones as you typically would during an international flight, you could spend half your vacation trying to adjust to your new time zone. Some people have minor disturbances and could still function while jetlagged while others might have debilitating jet lag that shuts them down completely.
Jet lag is also often worsened by anxiety and nervousness. Even though jet lag is often inevitable, our diet and nutrition can reduce how badly jet lag affects our body and ultimately, our travel experience. Clean healthy eating, before traveling and during travel, can be calming on the body and reduce anxiety and nervousness which ultimately reduces jetlag. According to medical research, clean eating like ingesting foods like raw apples can minimize jet lag and travel fatigue. Drinking water and keeping clean and hydrated before, during, and after travel, can also drastically reduce jet lag and help you get started on your vacation with more energy and enthusiasm.
4. Be Happier and Have More Fun with Travel
Most travelers take trips to relax, connect with others, experience a new place, challenge themselves, and create memories. Most of us set off on a new trip, excited and hopeful for a happy time. Some of us are heading off on an adventure to shake off our sadness. Regardless of why we travel, most of us prefer to depart for our trip in a happy mood, stay happy during our travels, and return home happier, more positive, and more energized. If we are not happy at the onset of our travel and during our travel, chances are that our sad mood will negatively affect the outcome of our vacation or trip.
Clean eating not only makes you healthier, but it also makes you happier. Researchers in England and Australia found a direct relationship between happiness and consuming fruits and vegetables, two of the baseline food groups in clean eating. People who added more fruits and vegetables to their diet reported a boost in their life satisfaction and happiness. And incidentally, their happiness increased for each extra portion of fruit and veggies they consumed, up to a maximum of eight portions per day. Traveling is more enjoyable when you start your trip happy and end happy. By eating clean, you will feel naturally happy and have more fun on your trip.
5. Have Enough Energy for More Fun Activities While on A Trip
Traveling requires a lot of energy! From packing to traveling to getting to your accommodation and onwards to the fun sightseeing you’ve probably spent hours planning out for your trip, travel can be time very energy-draining, in a positive way of course. And when you add jetlag to the unavoidable travel fatigue that comes with most trips, you could end up feeling spent while on vacation. There are so many ways to maintain your energy before and during travel including practicing breathing exercises, mediation, staying hydrated and catching up on sleep, but one of the most important ways to improve your energy levels is through clean eating – pre-travel, during your travel, and post-travel.
Eating clean healthy foods such as nuts, fruits, veggies, and lean protein, as well as drinking sufficient water, can fuel you up with the right energy. Foods like eggs can stimulate energy production in your body as well as breakdown stored fat to energy. Apples, for instance, are one of the recommended fruits for clean eating and studies show that apples can slowly release energy over an extended period of time. So, if you practice clean eating prior to your trip, you will have residual energy to expend on fun adventures and sightseeing during your travels. Since most trips are often time-limited and you have to return home at some point, you can’t afford to lose valuable vacation time being tired. Thus, being energetic while traveling can improve your chances of checking off what’s important to you while on your trip.
6. Be Stronger and Experience More Adventures on Your Trip
Energy and strength are almost interchangeable, however, there are subtle differences between them, and ideally, you need to have both in abundance to make the best of your vacation. When you have enough energy, you can keep going and going, doing a lot more than someone who is less energetic. However, you can have all the energy in the world but if you’re not strong enough, you might end up skipping certain activities while on a trip, especially outdoor and adventurous activities that require strength and stamina. Just like energy, certain travel activities, including getting from your home to your final destination require that you have a certain strength level to execute the trip.
Clean eating helps to build muscle strength. At its core, clean eating is about focusing your nutrition around healthy nutritious foods while avoiding processed food, refined foods, and artificial food ingredients. When done right, clean eating incorporates foods such as broccoli, cabbage, legumes, nuts, green leafy vegetables, seeds, whole grains - which are all rich in calcium and magnesium necessary for strong bones. Clean eating, especially eating high protein food, also naturally leads to weight loss and increases our muscle mass and muscle strength. With an increase in bone strength as well as muscle strength, we are better able to engage and participate in more activities while traveling.
7. Better Sleep and A Better Vacation
Travelers often worry about how to stay healthy during active travel. They worry about getting travel-related illnesses including Travelers’ Diarrhea. Getting enough sleep boosts your immune system and reduces your chances of getting sick while traveling. Getting sufficient sleep also has other benefits including strengthening our heart, increasing our productivity, improving our stamina, and sharpening our focus. No one likes getting sick on a trip, or making their travel companions sick, and, taking time off your vacation to “be sick” can be disheartening. It gets worse if you end up needing medical care, especially in a different country as your travel funds could easily get diverted to medical expenses rather than fun activities. You certainly don’t want to take time out of your trip to figure out what your insurance covers or doesn’t cover while you’re on a trip.
We can however reduce the risks of getting sick by eating clean. Clean eating has been shown to promote long, and quality sleep, and since getting enough sleep promotes our natural immunity, eating the right foods will improve our quality of sleep and promote healthier travel. Aside from clean eating, other ways to promote a better night's sleep while traveling include avoiding caffeine a few hours before bedtime, drinking relaxing teas like chamomile tea before bedtime, and limiting late evening meals to avoid nighttime stomach upset.
No one likes to fall sick during travel. Fortunately, eating just the right types of food in the right amount can help our body build the resilience it needs to sustain the stress of travel. By practicing daily clean eating, your body is able to harness all the positive effects of whole and healthy foods over an extended period of time and regardless of when you travel and how you travel, you will have a safer, healthier, and better travel experience.