Hardness23’s BodyBlog

After talking with my Biochemisty professor (University of Arizona) today some things were brought to my attention from a scientific perspective.  First of all, taking glutamine supplements are not that beneficial.  It’s not even as good at synthesizing gluecose for the muscles as alanine is because it has to go through the citric acid cycle and get made into oxaloacetate before it can even enter the gluconeogetic process.  Alinine at least gets transfered right to pyruvate which leads to faster synthesis of gluecose.  So if we were to take any amino acid supplement it should be alinine but as my prof said it’s not even needed if you are on a high protein diet and won’t do any good.  He said he’s sick of all the lies in the bodybuilding community too.   All  it does is make it harder on the kidneys to filter out all the excess nitrate from the digestion of the amino acids.  And glutamine is harder on the kidney than alinine is because it has an extra NH2 group.

Also,  every one freaks out about the body eating muscle tissue for energy.  The ONLY WAY, as was told to me today by my professor who actually worked with Dr. Krebb (as in Krebbs Cycle) in his PhD studies, that the body breaks down muscle for energy is if you go more than ten hours without eating and enter the pre-starvation state.  This is when you have used up all of your liver glycogen (which is your carb stoarge that lasts 10 hours after your last meal) and only then do you start eating into the muscle.  The body uses a glugagon like peptide to turn protein into glucose when you are low carb dieting so even if you have had no carbs, you will not break down muscle unless you are STARVED more than 10 hours without food.  But as long as you are eating sufficient protein you are providing your muscles with the source of muscle glycogen that they need to function.  So basically the point is and he said this directly, is that you can knock carbs out completely and in terms of muscle you will NOT break it down assuming you are on a high protein diet because your body adapts and uses the protein for what it needs.  The only thing he said that can be harmful from a high protein/low carb diet is that it is a little much on the kidneys which need to filter out all the excess nitrates from the breakdown of the protein and over time this can be harmful.  Take it for what it’s worth.  This at least answers some questions I’ve had in the past especially after talking to some women who have said they don’t eat carbs year around because carbs make them feel like crap (same here) and just eat high protein diets with some fruit here and there for the nutritional values.  They are still able to put on lots of muscle and stay lean because there are no excess carbs (which is really just a form of sugar) getting transferred to fat.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.