Posts Tagged: protein

Nutrition / Questions — 0 Comments
9
May 09

Supplementation. Macronutrients vs. Micronutrients.

I have received a few questions lately about various supplements and which are the best to take. My general stance on supplementation is that it’s not needed… but let me elaborate:

Supplementation implies that you have a void in your basic diet that needs to be filled. It is a solution to a symptom, and not a cause.

Nutrition is at the foundation of health and well being, and every culture in the world already knows the secret to good health: You are what you eat!There is little room for argument surrounding the fact that your body can only repair and fuel your body with the food that you are feeding it. If you are feeding yourself refined, modified, denatured, and otherwise chemically altered variations of food, then how do you expect your body to perform? To use an analogy, would you pour dirty gas into your car and expect it to perform at an optimal level? Probably not.

To restate what I have said in earlier posts, food should not be broken down into micronutrients. There is a popular trend in the media right now to tout the latest magic bullet pill, vitamin, or antioxidant as the cure to X health risk. The problem with this approach is that our place in nature is a part of a larger system. Our genome didn’t evolve to eat the extracted vitamin C from citrus fruits, or isolate whey protein from milk, or iron pills, we evolved to eat the WHOLE FRUIT, and drink WHOLE MILK, and eat WHOLE VEGETABLES… seeing a trend here?

The three macronutrients of protein, carbohydrate, and fat are the building blocks of human life. Keeping your food in the rawest form you can before digestion ensures that you are getting as much nutrition as you can from the food you eat. Excessive heating, processing, and nutrient isolation removes much of the digestive enzymes from food that helps your body process and break down these foods into useful compounds. Without these enzymes, many foods get treated by the digestive system as a threat and trigger a stress response.

Supplements often lack many of the chemical components that allow the body to use them properly. To compensate for this, most supplements increase the amount of raw product you have you ingest to absorb a significant amount of whatever nutrient you are supplementing for. This practice can often lead to allergies caused by repetitive exposure to compounds that agitate the digestive system.

If you feel that you need to supplement your diet with a protein source, or vitamin, you should probably step back and take a look at where your real food diet is failing. A paleo based diet of meat, vegetable, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar, combined with proper proportions for your body type, should be providing all of the macronutrients, and consequently all of the micronutrients that you need to thrive.

Fats / Nutrition / Questions — 0 Comments
17
Mar 09

Milk. Part 1

Shannon recently asked:

What is the truth behind chocolate milk? I have heard that it is better for you than regular milk, and that you should drink it after a hard work out.

The answer to this question requires some background information on milk, so lets take a step back and look at the broader topic of dairy in general.

The verdict on dairy’s effectiveness as a healthy nutrient source has not been passed yet. There seems to be a war raging between those for the consumption of milk, mainly the dairy industry, and those against it, mainly vegan activists, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

As in most wars unfortunately, truth is usually the first victim, and the dairy battle is no exception. Propaganda put out by both parties of the debate have left little room for objective investigation, and truthful reporting of the facts.

Milk, it would seem is yet another case of the West’s industrial complex destroying a food that was once a valuable source of nutrients. Much like beef, chicken, and pork, our quest to squeeze the most profits out of a resource has left it barren of nutrients, and full of unknown additives. This shift is not just happening in animal products. Fruits and vegetables have long been selected for genes that express themselves as the best looking, best tasting, and longest lasting produce. Sounds good doesn’t it? Unfortunately, these traits have come at the detriment of our nutrition and health, as nutrients were needlessly bred out in favour of a taste (Read: Higher sugar content).

Similarly, through the processeses of pasteurization and homogenization, milk has been effectively stripped of most of it’s natural enzymes and bacteria that are necessary for the proper digestion of dairy products.

Furthermore, the common misconception that fat is evil has lead to the mass production of reduced fat milk.

Never drink reduced fat milk. (skim, 1%, 2%…)

Fat is taken out milk through a process that over-heats the milk until is it becomes a powder. The fat is separated, and then water is added back to the powder until a milk like consistency returns. You are essentially drinking water with milk ingredients to it. Not milk.

The heat, and exposure to oxygen during the powdering process also damages cholesterol in the milk, which can cause injury to your arterial cells, as well as cause a pathological buildup of plaque in the arteries similar to having high triglycerides.

Heating milk also:

  • Alters milks amino acids, lysine and tyrosine, making the proteins in milk less available for use.
  • Lowers Vitamin C content as much as 50%.
  • Lowers the water-soluable vitamin content as much as 80%.
  • Destroys vitamin B12 completely.

To mention just a few…

These destroyed vitamins are added in artificially after the pasteurization and fat reduction processes so that they may appear on the nutrition label.

If you would still like to consume milk, your best option is to try and find a source of raw milk. Unfortunately, raw milk is illegal to buy in Canada, however, the option does exist to buy a share in a cow. Drinking raw milk from a cow that you own is not illegal. Also, cheese is still allowed to be made from unpasteurized, raw milk. Emmental and Gruyere are just a few of the options.

The second best alternative to raw milk is to buy whole milk, or switch to goats milk which can still be bought in a raw form.

It seems like many other foods, paying attention to the source is the best way to ensure you are eating quality dairy. Furthermore, just as our diet affects our health and performance, the diet of our dairy source is equally important. I will cover importance of what cows are built to eat, and how that is important to humans in the second part of this series.

I admit I have digressed from Shannon’s original question, but it was necessary to formulate a complete answer. As you have read, milk is a good source of protein and vitamins… in it’s original state. Commercial production however, has destroyed most of what is good about milk, and the nutrients that it does contain are artificially inserted backing into the milk product.
Also milk, being high in lecithin produces a high glycemic load, and thus a high insulin response. Adding chocolate syrup (sugar) to milk adds to insulin response, and should thus be avoided.

There was a study however, published in 2006 which indicated that chocolate milk aids in recovery when taken after intense athletic workouts. The study authors believe this to be due to its ratio of carbohydrates to protein, among other nutritional properties. The study was small in scale and partially funded by the dairy industry, but the results may warrant further study. (“Chocolate Milk: The New Sports Drink?”, Associated Press, 24 February 2006)

Carbohydrates / Nutrition / Video — 0 Comments
16
Mar 09

Robb Wolf of CrossFit HQ on Insulin Resistance

Today’s CrossFit WOD post came with a video on insulin resistance that nicely coincides with the post I wrote a few days ago about the insulin response.

In the video Robb Wolf explains how our body’s resistance to insulin happens very much analogous to they way our olfactory reaction to perfume is very strong when we first smell a new scent. That smell fades however as our noses become desensitized to the perfume’s aroma. To experience the smell with the same intensity as the first inhale, we either have to increase the amount of perfume (similar to having to increase drug dosages to maintain effectiveness), or decrease our exposure to it. The sad reality is that most people choose the former when it comes to insulin levels.

When insulin resistance occurs, the body has trouble releasing the energy that it has already stored in fat cells, and thus asks for more food to burn as instant energy in the form of hunger pangs. If this demand is satiated by carbohydrates, as is common in North American eating habits, the cycle continues to repeat itself, and fat stores grow while energy levels need continuous “topping-up” with more carbs.

To elaborate what I said in the post on the insulin response, eating low Glycemic Index (GI) carbohydrates, in conjunction with fats and protein, will keep your blood glucose levels low, and thus maintain a normal insulin response.

You body is stuck in an evolutionary past where sugar was relatively non-existent. Due to this environmental scarcity, when a sugar source was eaten your digestive system became very good at instantly storing it as fat, not knowing when the next opportunity for such a high energy intake would be.

If you would not like to be in a constant battle with your genetics, limit your intake of high GI carbs, and cut the refined sugar.

Robb Wolf is both a scientist and athlete as a personal trainer at NorCal Strength & Conditioning. Robb is an NSCA Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist. In addition, he is a USAW Olympic Weightlifting coach, and a certified CrossFit Coach, the highest level of CrossFit training certification, possessed only by a handful of strength & conditioning coaches throughout the world.

Additionally, Robb is co-publisher and editor-in-chief of The Performance Menu.

Common Interest / Health / Questions — 0 Comments
13
Mar 09

Can you determine your economic status by how healthy you are?

Brandon, who writes Coachbjl’s blog, recently asked me:

Can you determine your economic status by how healthy you are?

In my opinion, the answer to this question is NO, because health is independent of socioeconomic status (SES).**

Eating well, and being conscious of your health should be a top priority in everyone’s life. If you agree with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it is easy to see how failing to satisfy the needs of good food and health will cause a major weakness in your personal pyramid.

We live in a world in which obesity has reached epidemic proportions. With more than 1 billion adults overweight (at least 300 million of them clinically obese), this extra bulk is a major contributor to the global burden of chronic disease and disability. Often coexisting in developing countries with under-nutrition, obesity is a complex condition, with serious social and psychological dimensions, affecting virtually all ages and socioeconomic groups.

We as North Americans pride ourselves on being part of the developed world and having the resources to feed our population. It is sad that the way we have chosen to feed these people is with refined corn products such as high fructose corn syrup, and meat that has been so pumped full of antibiotics that it’s slowly destroying our immune systems. Combined this with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and it is easy to see why obesity rates are exploding across all socioeconomic levels.

Figuratively speaking, yes everyone eats, but most of them eat crap!

To get back to Brandon’s question, just as economic status doesn’t determine health, health can’t determine your economic status. It works similar to trying to judge SES by looking at the clothes someone is wearing, or the car they are driving. Almost impossible in today’s credit supported, culture of stuff.

What health can determine or at least positively affect however, is a person’s happiness.

A healthy body, fueled by good food is an excellent vehicle for fun. You will be able to take part in more experiences, not miss out due to illness, and living your life upright and able instead of overweight and in a chair.

If you are worried about how to finance your new healthy way of eating, consider this: An apple cost less than a bag of chips, water is free, and when you stop spending money on cheap carbohydrates which have little food value, and only make you feel more hungry. You will have all that money to spend on good quality protein and fats.

** In the developed world.

Nutrition — 0 Comments
9
Mar 09

Protein Powder?

I was asked an excellent question today regarding protein powder and whether it is a good supplement or not.

I will answer this question by posing my own question: Why not just eat the original source?

The short answer is AVOID WHENEVER POSSIBLE!

Most protein powder on the market is a highly processed, isolate form of either soy, whey, casein, or egg white protein. The source food is removed of it’s other components usually through a high-temperature process that leaves only the remaining protein molecule. This isolate protein however has now been denatured to such an extent that it is virtually useless to the body, not to mention they also contain nitrates and other carcinogens.

Our body has evolved to process meat. We are omnivores by design, and we should not be fighting biology when choosing our food sources. Meat, eggs, and some plants are excellent protein sources because they also contain OTHER components, many of which our body needs to process the protein (more on this in future posts). This was all the Paleolithic man had to survive on, and the ever resourceful human digestion system has evolved to handle the consumption of the entire protein source, fats and fiber (to name a few) included.

That being said, modern life can leave you stretched for time, and the convenience of these protein powders does make them much less time consuming on a time invested vs time to ingest scale. So if your lifestyle demands that you use protein powder, please use care when choosing your brands.

Hemp protein should be your first choice if eating whole meats or eggs is too inconvenient. Hemp is one of the least processed protein options on the market, and unlike many other plant based proteins, it is fully balanced and contains all 9 essential amino acids (it also contains some other good nutrients).

Some people have trouble processing hemp however. If you all into this category, try and choose a protein powder that has been Cold-Filtered. The Cold-Filtration process separates the proteins by micro-filtering the mass in a chilled environment. The mass is then spray dried in a non-heat environment to preserve the protein structure.

Kelly Frankson, CrossFit trainer and Olympic Weightlifter recommends True Protein’s Cold-Filtration Protein Powder.

Nutrition / Protein — 0 Comments
9
Mar 09

Hemp Protein – The King of Plants

The following post was written by Mathew G. Kadey MSc., an Ontario-based dietician and writer.

The importance of obtaining high quality protein from the diet should not be taken lightly. Protein is the fundamental building block for
our muscles and it is essential that these
same muscles be supplied with a daily dose of high quality protein. This is especially true for those who are exercising on a regular basis.
As a result of this need, protein powders are in high demand. Despite its drawbacks, soy protein has traditionally been the most
popular choice in terms of a plant protein supplement. However, there is now a new option and it’s definitely worth some attention.
For some time now, hemp as a food has been available in Hemp Seed Nut, Hemp Seed Nut Butter and Hemp Seed Oil forms. Now consumers can benefit from hemp in the form of a protein powder. Hemp Protein Powder has been raising eyebrows in the marketplace as a very competitive protein source and a great source of all the essential amino acids.
Hemp foods come from the same plant species as marijuana (Cannabis sativa l.), but from a special variety that contains virtually no THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the chemical that triggers marijuana’s psychoactive effects. Hemp Protein Powder is produced when whole hemp seeds are cold-pressed to expel the oil, leaving behind a dry “cake.” This cake is then milled at low temperatures to remove some of the fibre and produce a concentrated form of protein.

Nutritional Benefits of Hemp… Continue reading →