Blueberries, Bananas, Exercise Recovery

The PURPOSE of this study is to investigate the combined influence of 2-weeks blueberry ingestion and banana ingestion (during exercise) on performance and in mitigating metabolic perturbation, immune dysfunction, and increase in inflammation following a 75-km cycling time trial. We hypothesize that the combination of 2-weeks ingestion of blueberries (versus placebo) and acute ingestion of bananas (versus water alone) during 75-km cycling will: 1. Enhance performance. 2. Attenuate the magnitude of metabolic perturbation due to exercise (using a targeted panel of metabolites) which may be associated with increased plasma levels of beneficial gut-derived phenolics. 3. Attenuate post-exercise inflammation (as measured with cytokines, muscle damage markers, regulatory lipid mediators, ex-vivo monocyte cell cultures, and targeted immune proteins including S100A8 and S100A12). 4. Counter post-exercise downturns in innate immune function (natural killer cell lytic activity), and viral defense (using an ex-vivo cell culture with Hela cells).