Functional Foods aka Supplements-Part One

at 3:15 PM

Do supplements (functional foods) help in training? Are they necessary for the average Moj or are they only for the elite athlete? Can you simply believe the ads you see in fitness magazines for the 'right supplement' to make you leaner and stronger? I've done my research and I'm familiar with the science behind these supplements and how they work in the body in their normal biological amounts and will break each one down to its basics, and what peer-reviewed research says about them. I hope it will make your decision making a little easier. Remember this: the fine print in the ad is not going to say, "Well, the research on this supplement is a little murky but go ahead and buy our product anyway and who knows... heart problems, strokes and unwanted hair may occur at some point."

Let me just say this: Some people have this misconception that if they start having supplemental protein, by some miracle they will start getting lean! NOT TRUE! Even if you are eating a lot of protein and consuming tons of calories, weight loss will be improbable if not impossible. As a nation, we eat too many fats, proteins and sugar.

Proteins are made of their building blocks called amino acids. There are twenty of them. Eight of these are 'essential amino acids'; meaning that your body does not synthesize them, and you must get them from your diet. When we ingest more amino acids than our bodies can use the extra is simply degraded.

What is Creatine?

Fuel molecules break down in our bodies to produce energy. But sometimes processes that produce energy take time to gear up so during exercises such as sprinting, the human body has an alternative molecule, creatine, that can supply energy at a high rate. Most of our creatine is in our skeletal muscle (the muscles that we use for voluntary movement).

Bottom line: Creatine is important in high intensity exercises such as sprinting.

Research shows that creatine supplementation does increase the concentration of creatine in skeletal muscle, but does this really lead to an improvement in exercise performance? Hundreds of studies have looked at this questions and here is my conclusion:

Creatine supplementation appears to be effective in short-term, high-intensity exercise lasting a few minutes. The long term side effects are not known. And, only a fraction of the large supplemental doses are actually retained by the body, the rest is filtered by the kidneys and excreted in the urine. If you are eating meat you are getting plenty of creatine.