- Morning Trainiacs, just a cozy little one mile swim there.
Nothing very serious, just a little bit of speed
as we're in the off-season to make sure that
my body doesn't forget how to turn its arms over quickly.
So over the last couple weeks I have noticed
some adverse reactions with a whey protein supplement
that I've been testing out for the past little while.
So I did a fair bit of research over the last few days
and there's a lot about about whey protein
that supplement companies aren't telling you
that is not so good for you.
No, I'm gonna tell you.
(upbeat techno music)
OK, so after ever single workout that I do
and that you should do, I have a recovery drink
that comes in a four-to-one carb to protein ratio.
Now, what I've been using has been a vegan recovery drink,
this is called Iron Vegan, I'm not really specific to them
for any one reason, but it's that four-to-one
carb to protein ratio from a vegan protein source.
So I haven't really experienced this issue
with whey protein until I started incorporating Quest bars,
which are fairly clean-ish, into one of the snacks
that I have throughout the day.
Now Quest bars get their protein primarily
from a milk and whey protein isolate,
and what I was experiencing was ravenous hunger
in the 90 minutes to two and a half hour time frame.
It was like eating Chinese food,
like I'd eat one of these and boom,
I'd instantly be hungry again, and this is caused by
a really big insulin spike and then a insulin crash.
And this is a massive issue
to athletes for a number of reasons.
For starters, the more serious issue
is that insulin spikes over and over and over
can cause insulin resistance, eventually leading to
pre-diabetic conditions, or type two diabetes.
And then for athletes, one of the biggest concerns
is that we have, particularly endurance athletes,
the biggest limiting factor that we have
is our body composition, how much fat do we have.
And constantly spiking our insulin levels,
having that crash, and craving food over and over,
makes body composition and weight management
almost impossible, basically doing the exact opposite
of what these health bars claim to do.
So you can find all this just by Googling
whey protein blood sugar spike, and it's an auto-complete.
But I will put a couple of links to the studies that I found
in the description below if you want to see them.
And what was found is that because whey protein
is such a fast-acting protein, your body needs to convert
some of the protein into glucose, to give itself energy
to use that protein in the repair process
of assimilating it in our body.
And what was found in this one study
is that when you compare the insulin spike in whey protein,
to white bread, to just straight up glucose,
the biggest insulin spike
actually came from the whey protein.
Now for starters, they claim that you need
a huge amount of protein that acts as fast as possible,
like a whey protein, immediately after a workout.
Well the fact of the matter is that
whether you have your protein immediately after a workout,
or later in the day, it doesn't matter.
Actually it's been shown that
to have it later in the day might be better.
Our body repairs itself at night,
so give it the building blocks, I.e. protein,
to repair the muscles at night!
Our body workout has just exhausted
all of its energy reserves, I.e. carbs,
so after a workout, give your body carbs.
Not necessarily protein.
Match up what your body is doing
to the timing that it needs.
So that slow digesting vegan protein
or casein protein, just fine.
Next. This, this right here.
What a lot of protein companies tell you
is that you need 30, 60, 90 grams of protein,
multiple times throughout the day
from a whey protein because it's very easy to consume.
Well, fact of the matter is that your body
can only assimilate somewhere around
25 to 30 grams of protein at a time.
Which is roughly the amount of protein
in a steak the size of just the palm of your hand.
Any larger than that, any more protein than that,
and it gets turned into glucose,
it gets stored as fat, or just pooped out.
So we don't need that much protein.
Really, you only need one gram
for every kilogram of body weight that you have.
For me, about 73 grams throughout the day,
that's really easy to get.
If you are a really high performance athlete,
somewhere around 1.2 grams per kilogram of body weight
is all you need throughout the day.
And then finally, what they'll be saying
is that these plant proteins, these vegan proteins
aren't as bio-available, that our body can't access
all the protein because it's too much work to break it down.
That's true, it is harder to break this down
than a whey protein, but if we go back to the last point,
where we realized that we don't need to just be
stuffing protein into our body constantly all day,
all of a sudden this doesn't look so bad.
When you take in, say 20 grams of protein,
and even if it's only half as bio-available,
you got 10 grams of protein,
and then you have a meal later in the evening
with a little bit of meat, or you have some eggs,
or you have some legumes if you're vegan, you can get
your 70, to 90, to 100 grams of protein very, very easily.
You don't need to be slamming whey protein shakes all day.
Basically that argument is moot.
- This is all a moo point.
- So what's a Trainiac to do, you might say?
Well, what you need to do, and this is not an endorsement
for this protein, like I say I really don't care
if it's this or some other protein,
after a workout you wanna have somewhere around
150 total calories, in a four-to-one carb to protein ratio.
Make that protein from either a plant source,
or a casein protein which is a much slower digesting
source of protein, still from milk, but just doesn't have
that massive blood glucose insulin response.
And then, unless you really want to
give yourself weight management issues
and cravings that you gotta fight throughout the day
just to prove to yourself that you are tougher
than the protein is, I don't know why you'd want to do that,
avoid whey protein throughout the day,
which is a real shame,
because Quest bars are pretty delicious.
So there you go Trainiacs.
If you aren't already subscribed
hit the subscribe button below.
If you are subscribed, well I'll usher you
into the end of this video a little montage
of my swim from earlier today.
If you want details about that swim,
and just more of this kind of tips in general,
go to triathlontaren.com/traininglog
for all the details of literally
that swim that I did this morning.
And, tips like this are shared every single week.
Later Trainiacs.
(upbeat techno music)