Why Leucine 🔥 Have you met the most powerful amino acid to help you preserve muscle and burn fat? It’s called leucine. What is leucine, exactly? Leucine is a branched-chain amino acid (BCAA), which means it is transported to various tissues, including muscles, after your body processes it. This essential amino acid, found in protein-rich foods, is crucial for muscle health and can’t be produced by your body. What makes leucine so special? Your muscles are in a continuous state of breakdown and repair called “protein turnover.” Leucine plays a unique role in stimulating muscle protein synthesis. Muscle repair is necessary for physical activity because exercise causes muscle protein breakdown. This makes leucine important for maintaining lean body mass. How does it help you maintain a healthy weight? If you’re trying to lose weight, you want to lose body fat but maintain lean body mass, as lean body mass supports your metabolism. This is where leucine comes in. It helps you not only keep but actually build muscle so that you preserve your metabolism. That way, when you stop cutting calories, you still have that metabolically active tissue to help you burn fat rather than muscle, even at rest! It’s all about balance Studies have shown that adequate protein enhanced with added leucine used as a meal replacement can be effective in promoting weight loss from fat while preserving muscle mass. This is why products like Life Shake™, Shaklee 180® Meal-in-a-Bar, and Performance® Advanced Physique® 100% Grass-Fed Whey Protein* contain leucine to help you preserve and build lean muscle. Keep in mind that leucine isn’t the only player in the game––it needs to team up with exercise and adequate protein to help you achieve a healthier weight. Let us know if you have any questions about leucine or leucine products. We are happy to answer! Check out this research paper: Where to find leucine in food and how to feed elderly with sarcopenia in order to counteract loss of muscle mass: Practical advice. doi: 10.3389/fnut.2020.622391 (Frontiers in Nutrition, Jan 2021, vol 7, article 622391)
OPTIMIZING YOUR PROTEIN INTAKE, (PART 2) Hey everyone, have you wondered: “Why should I eat protein with every meal and snack? Why not eat most of my protein in 1-2 meals?” Good question! 🤓 🔬 Here’s why: First, studies show that eating more than 40 grams of protein in one meal is no more beneficial than having 15–30 grams in one sitting. So if you try to stack all your protein into one or two meals, you’ll likely to lose the benefit of that extra protein. Plus, unlike carbs and fat, your body can’t store protein for later. Surplus carbs are broken down and stored in your body as glycogen or fat. Surplus fat is mostly stored as body fat. But protein isn’t squirreled away for later. Rather, after your body does everything it needs to with the protein that you eat in a meal, it uses anything left for energy or converts it into fat or glucose. In other words, because your body isn’t storing protein AT ALL, you need to regularly fuel up on it! Otherwise, you don’t have much to work with to build and maintain your muscles, produce hormones, build and repair tissues, maintain your bones, support your metabolism, and so on. THAT IS IMPORTANT!! And DO NOT skip breakfast. Make sure it has 1/3 of the days protein and eat it before your carbs so you aren’t chasing blood sugar all day. Chase proteins instead, at each meal. (thank you Sue Lamdin) Check out this excellent article: https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/…/are-you… ➡️ I’D LOVE TO HEAR ANY TIPS THAT HAVE HELPED YOU EAT MORE PROTEIN THROUGHOUT THE DAY. PLEASE SHARE!!
Water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink, because it is all over the basement floor. We have a little artesian spring in a floor crack and the sump pump is going every few minutes. One might say the water table is high, or my house is floating. I used some extra protein tonight using the squeegee to get more water into the sump hole. I am counting that as resistance training. It is good to help prevent sarcopenia. How are you doing with adding protein to each meal and snack. See today’s picture below for some ideas. Bon appetit
How Protein Helps Weight loss and Muscle Growth Two really good reasons to eat more protein are weight loss and muscle support. These two things are connected! 💪 Eating protein helps you build and maintain lean body mass––and the more lean body mass you have, the more calories you burn at rest. (Love that “at rest” part!) There is also one particular amino acid called leucine that helps you lose fat rather than muscle when you lose weight. (More on leucine later!) Leucine is the key to adding muscle and with the other amino acids does the job much better and more efficiently with exercise, shall we say, intentional movement. Without the stress of movement not much will happen. 🍽 Protein significantly increases satiety, which means you feel fuller despite eating less. Eating more protein often causes people to eat less overall. 🔥Just by having more protein in your diet, you burn more calories. Why? Because your body has to work harder to digest protein than fats or carbs, giving you more potential to burn calories and body fat. This is called the thermic effect of food. Have you ever noticed that you feel fuller longer when you have plenty of protein in your meal?
WE HAVE A NEW CHALLENGE and it’s all about PROTEIN!!! We’re calling this Powerup! Okay, why are we so excited about protein? Because it can help you do all of this AND more: • Achieve and maintain a healthy weight • Boost immune function • Keep blood sugar balanced • Build and repair tissues • Maintain muscle mass We’ll dig into these points and others starting tomorrow! 🔬 Shaklee’s science and nutrition team have helped prepare what we’ll share, so you know it will be evidence-based i.e. it’s not some latest & great fad/craze. We will also be sharing lots of tips, recipes, and meal hacks for optimizing your protein intakein a healthy way. 🙌 Plus: giveaways! 🎁 🌟 STARTING TOMORROW: For this 7-Day Challenge, aim to do the following daily habits and mark them off on your Habit Tracker (posted later today). OK so what is the challenge: • Eat 20+ grams of protein with each meal and snack • Drink 60+ oz of water • Drink a Life Shake™ daily • Get 7+ hours of sleep each night • Resistance train 2-3x during the week How do I participate? 6. 📝 Fill out your daily Habit Tracker each day. (Save the image we’ll share and check it off digitally OR print the PDF version from the Files tab.) 7. 📲 Post your Tracker in the comments section of our daily Check-In post. 8. 💬 Join the discussion! Share fun recipes or tips in the comments––we want to see! 9. 🎁 Win free prizes! Be entered into our raffles by posting your Tracker, commenting on our posts, and sharing with the group. The more you participate, the more chance you have of winning. 10. 🎉 Have fun! Invite a friend! 11. Be with us and your body will be so happy. If you are not a member of our private group: Wellness 360 – #GenH let me know and I will invite you. See you there…
Protein. Starting Monday, March 25th is our Protein Up Challenge. 5 days of info on Protein, what it is, why, how, and more. Recipes, science, give a ways, teasers, and more. We have 10,000 individual proteins in our bodies, how did you feed that crowd today, this past week, and longer. Did you get enough Leucine to make more muscle, etc and etc. … And we will mention our very reliable, safe, tasty, guaranteed, backed by a great deal of actual science done on/with the finished product, products This is rare in the industry. Library research on the ingredients is most common, if there is any at all. In the Tufts study I mentioned in yesterday’s post women who had higher amounts of protein sourced from plants were less likely to have heart disease, cancer, diabetes, or declines in cognitive/mental health in a 32 year long study. You may understand why this is important. If you are not a member of our private Facebook group Wellness 360-#GenH, let me know and I will forward an invitation to you. We start Monday. If you are a member go the group and all the Challenge info is right there. Take a peek at the other things too. It is a great resource
Next week, Monday the 25th is the start of our week of the Protein Challenge. This is a week of our dive into the importance of daily protein intake and why and how. As a Clinical Dietitian, chef, I have cooked for 1,000s of people and watched them eat. In our culture we have desert for breakfast, and throughout the day. I am campaigning for savory breakfasts so we don’t have to chase our blood sugar through the whole day. This would be a meal that gives you at least 30% of your daily protein needs, and sparse carbohydrate. The caveat being to eat the protein first, then the carbs, then the coffee, or other caffeine. Of course, this is after a night of great 8 hours of sleep. A recent study from Tufts in AJCN, “Diets rich in plant protein linked to healthy aging: Nurses Health Study”, found that women who had diets rich in mostly plant based protein had fewer chronic diseases and were more likely to be healthier overall as they aged. They were less likely to have heart disease, cancer, diabetes, or declines in cognitive/mental health over a follow up period which began in 1984 and ended in 2016. These subjects were 46% more likely to be healthy into their later years. Regarding Monday-our group is a private FB group Wellness 360 – #GenH. Some of you are members. If you aren’t ask me to invite you. Since FB just told me they are encrypting my messages, don’t message me, comment your request in this post, and I will invite you. Bon appetit, Bruce
Lately I have been answering questions from several people about their pending lab work and their health concerns. How to get the most out of their labs so they can optimize their wellness plan was the main driver for the questions. The coincidence is that I had to do it for myself. I had many questions about the missing elements of my standard of care, cookie cutter, in the box labs, over the years. I have been working in a functional medicine scope and have been exposed to critical thinking and out of the common box methods and strategic elements to look at. Looking is not the whole story, If you don’t ask the right questions, you can’t get the right answers. So here is a picture, your lab work, how and what does it relate to? What is upstream and what is downstream? What can we, should we, do about it? Just being within a certain range is not the story, and not a safe option to ignore. All the items relate to each other, the ratios matter, other relationships matter. The missing data matters, and also answers a question of what questions were asked and not asked. Often there are many choices, so there may be more discussion, more looking. What put the thinking into positive action for me was reading Dr. Peter Attia’s book “Outlive”, published in 2023. The whole book is outstanding, Chapter 7, The Ticker, really put the test questions together for me. He also explains why these are necessary, not nice to know, need to know. There are threads like this throughout the book. It will be one book that I will read and refer to many times. I have already read Chap 7 three times. What I do, and suggest you do, is to prepare your doctor for your appointment by writing a note regarding what you want to discuss and want for labwork. Do your homework, your due diligence. Don’t email it, or message it or voicemail it!!! Neatly write it or type it, put it inside a nice card (people open cards, not so much business like mail) and deliver it several days before your appointment. First thing my Doc said last week was “I read your Love letter”. We had a great appointment, exceptional. His assistant had studied it too, and we had a productive pre appointment. You are in charge of you, it is a Do It Yourself project. The Doc is an advisor, a gate opener who needs your help. TTFN…
Our next health challenge is called “Protein Power Up”. It begins next Monday, March 25th. If you are not yet in our private FB group, Wellness 360-#GenH, let me know and I will send you an invitation! Once in, it will enable you to participate in any or all of our twice/month challenges! You will find a lot of free, well-researched and documented nutritional information, a daily tracker to help you see how you are doing….to say nothing of great support from others!! Come on the journey with us, it is painless, and every day is a school day!!!
Norwegians and St. Patrick’s Day The reason the Irish celebrate St. Patrick’s Day is because this is when St. Patrick drove the Norwegians out of Ireland. It seems that some centuries ago, many Norwegians came to Ireland to escape the bitterness of the Norwegian winter. Ireland was having a famine at the time, and food was scarce. The Norwegians were eating almost all the fish caught in the area, leaving the Irish with nothing to eat but potatoes. St. Patrick, taking matters into his own hands, as most Irishmen do, decided the Norwegians had to go. Secretly, he organized the Irish IRATRION (Irish Republican Army to Rid Ireland of Norwegians). Irish members of IRATRION passed a law in Ireland that prohibited merchants from selling ice boxes or ice to the Norwegians, in hopes that their fish would spoil. This would force the Norwegians to flee to a colder climate where their fish would keep. Well, the fish spoiled, all right, but the Norwegians, as everyone knows today, thrive on spoiled fish So, faced with failure, the desperate Irishmen sneaked into the Norwegian fish storage caves in the dead of night and sprinkled the rotten fish with lye, hoping to poison the Norwegian invaders. But, as everyone knows, the Norwegians thought this only added to the flavor of the fish, and they liked it so much they decided to call it “lutefisk,” which is Norwegian for “luscious fish.” Matters became even worse for the Irishmen when the Norwegians started taking over the Irish potato crop and making something called “lefse.” Poor St. Patrick was at his wit’s end, and finally on March 17th, he blew his top and told all the Norwegians to “GO TO HELL!” So they all got in their boats and emigrated to Minnesota—- the only other paradise on earth where smelly fish, old potatoes and plenty of cold weather can be found in abundance. The End.
