Health Articles

Details: Ben Fuchs

Fatty nutrients are tricky. On the one hand, essential fats such as EFAs, Vitamin D, E, A and K, in addition to plant nutrients, are super-important. They’re particularly significant for long-term kinds of biological process such as building muscle and bone, for fertility, baby building and even stress management. On the other hand, they’re complex and sticky molecules that are difficult for the digestive system to process and require a lot of energy to be extracted from foods.

Details: Ben Fuchs

In the world of sports performance you’re not going to find a more popular and important anabolic strength-boosting supplement than glutamine, an extremely well-researched therapeutic nutrient that does a lot more than build muscle.

Glutamine is said to be a “conditionally essential amino acid”. The “amino acid” part refers to the fact that among other things the body uses it to create proteins, while “conditionally essential” means you may not absolutely need to. It’s probably a good idea to dose with it daily via foods or supplementation.

All of this is to say, glutamine is important stuff! While there are over twenty different amino acids in the body, nearly 60 percent of the free floating ones are glutamine and 5 to 6 percent of the ones used in various proteins are glutamine.

Glutamine’s reputation as a go-to building nutrient is well-deserved and it’s been used as such by body builders and weight lifters for decades. It can also help athletes after prolonged strenuous exercise by decreasing infections and preventing the breakdown of muscle. And that’s not all! Glutamine also has a buffering effect on acid and other chemicals that can cause fatigue during intense exercise. By reducing the impact of these biochemical by-products, workout warriors can pump out more reps and get stronger faster.

As functional as glutamine is for athletes, you don’t have to be a gym rat to enjoy its anabolic body building benefits. Breast feeding infants depend on it as a growth inducing element and up to half of the amino acids in mother’s milk are glutamine.

Details: Ben Fuchs

Hormones. We hear the word all the time. “Hormonal acne”, “woman’s hormones”, “stress hormones “, almost every measurement of health is impacted by these ubiquitous biochemicals. And when it comes to health, no aspect of our biochemistry is more relevant than the efficient and effective function of hormones.

While there are various classes of hormones, including “exocrine hormones” that work through the skin and the digestive tract (those produced in the pancreatic sweat and salivary glands for example) and “paracrine hormones” (prostaglandins and interleukins are classic examples), whose activities are restricted to the microscopic regions around a cell, the most commonly recognized hormones are part of what is known as the “endocrine system”. These hormones, with names like cortisol, testosterone and insulin, travel throughout the body via the blood, where they exert their effects by seeking, contacting and activating the cells of various structures and organs throughout the body.