From: bradbury@sftwks.UUCP (Robert Bradbury)
Newsgroups: sci.med.nutrition
Subject: Re: Nutrition & Weight Training
Summary: There is a big difference in how your body uses energy
Date: 4 Sep 92 07:15:31 GMT
Organization: Softworks Ltd, Seattle, WA

In article <1992Sep3.023401.18613@unlinfo.unl.edu> mgleason@cse.unl.edu (Mike Gleason) writes:
>I've seen on various exercise shows like ESPN's Bodyshapers where physical
>trainers claim that "Diet is half the battle" to gain strength and muscle
>tone.  I'm a casual weight trainer who is skeptical that ingesting hoards
>of weird vitamins and weight gain powder would be significantly more
>effective than a normal, 4 food groups type of diet.
>
>Has there been a study on this somewhere?  Like have one group of weight
>trainers use vitamins/calorie powder, and another control group train on
>a regular diet, and see how much strength each group gained over a set
>period of time.

I haven't seen any studies on this kind of thing though I suspect that
they exist in the Journal of Nutrition or Int. J. Sports Medicine. 
I have seen studies that indicate that weight training for the elderly
is a very good thing.  They can make significant strength gains with
little weight gain (increase the muscle to fat ratio) in relatively
short periods of time.

There is a clear difference in how your body processes fat vs.
carbohydrates vs. protein.  Fats are absorbed by adipose tissue
tissue and stored or may be used by the liver and muscles if the
demand for them is high when they are being released from your
intestines.  Carbohydrates are released into your blood as glucose
which stimulates the release of insulin tells your muscles and liver
to absorb the glucose and convert it to glycogen.  Insulin also
tells your adipose tissue to absorb glucose, convert it to
fat and store it.  Proteins will normally get converted to
amino acids which are used for building more proteins unless you
have excess protein intake in which case they get converted to
either fats or glucose in the liver and the fats or glucose feed
back into the pathways listed above.  To do this your liver must
remove the nitrogen from proteins.  Your body maintains a strict
nitrogen balance and will excrete extra nitrogen via the kidneys
(as urea) if it isn't used in building tissue.  (This is why extra
protein is harmful, it creates extra work for your kidneys.)  The
vitamin content of your diet (and your individual biochemistry/genetics)
will play a key role in how efficient all of this is.  The quality
of the protein is also important (you must have all of the essential
amino acids in the proper amounts, esp those essential amino acids which
are precursors for sex hormones which play a role in metabolism/muscle
building.)

So for the "experts" to say that diet is important is correct.
The best diet for most individuals is one that is high in vitamins
and complex carbohydrates probably several hours before a workout.
It should also contain sufficient in balanced amino acids to build
new muscle tissue and it should be low in fat and sugar.  I suspect
that all of the "hype" involving mega-supplements of vitamins or
amino acids is just that.  There will always be a few individuals who
due to their individual biochemical makeup may show "phenomenal"
responses to supplements but those responses should not be generalized
to everyone.  Note, that this is not the same as what I would recomend
for an anti-aging diet where there is a reasonable case to be made
for what the FDA might consider mega-supplements of some vitamins
and to a lesser extent a few minerals.

Robert Bradbury			uunet!sftwks!bradbury

Death is an imposition on the human race, and no longer acceptable
				Alan Harrington, The Immortalist (1969)
Newsgroups: sci.med.nutrition