Bodycomp News & Views Issue#4 June 2010

In this issue:

  1. The Importance of Protein
  2. Salmonbellies in the house!

 

Salmonbellies:

Bodycomp Imaging is pleased to be the official body composition providor of the New Westminster Salmonbellies. The team is coming in for baseline testing in early June. Stay tuned for some interesting stats on the team including average percent fat and muscle mass. These lean mean machines are about as fit as team based athletes come.

 

The Importance of Protein:


Despite being recognized as a essential building block of our bodies and also as a fuel source, protein intake is still a wildly disputed topic. The reason for this is that humans can survive with very small or very large protein intake. Also, the variation in human behavior makes for a huge range of protein needs depending upon the amount of muscle mass an individual has and how physically active they are.

The US daily intake is suggested to be between 0.8 and 1.0g/kg/day. For an individual my size, this only amounts to about 65g of protein per day. Considering that I can easily burn 3500 calories on a day where I am active and do some training, only 7% of my calories would be coming from protein. I suppose with this line of thinking the other 3240 calories should come from carbohydrates and fat - that does not seem very balanced to me.

I prefer to get about 30% of my calories from protein, 30% from fat and 40% from carbohydrates. This is more than the minimal suggestion, but is still in range with the upper limit set by Health Canada (10-35%).

Eating more protein than your body requires has many advantages - it provides a slow release of calories into the body and helps stabilize blood sugar. It is also very slow to digest so can often lead to a prolonged feeling of fullness and reduced caloric consumption over-all.

One must be careful not to use relatively high protein intake as an excuse to eat excessively fatty meat, smoked and processed meat or to take in too many calories. Try and have about 1/4 of your daily protein intake with each major meal and then consider a protein drink immediately post-workout or right before bed if you are hungry.