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.
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.
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Dr. Peter Glidden, a naturopathic physician and lecturer, discussed the body and its ability to benefit from natural healing instead of modern medicine. He detailed various natural remedies and supplements that can aid in the body's recovery of many ailments that affect us today. We don't have a free medical market in the United States-- your medical doctor may be a good person but they only know what they've been trained in, which is just one piece of the health puzzle, he asserted. "We have become...socialized into believing that the medical doctor owns the secret decoder ring to all things medical and everybody else practices substandard alternative back-of-the-bus medicine," which is just nonsense, he continued.
He listed a number of foods to stop eating, including grains such as wheat, barley, rye, and oats (which contain gluten), all bottled oils, fried foods, well-done meats, and carbonated beverages with a meal (the carbon dioxide interferes with digestion). He commended a caller who ate a vegan diet, yet cautioned him that he still needs to get mineral supplementation, as the soil where the produce is grown doesn't contain all the necessary nutrients. Glidden connected the problem of obesity to people eating foods with low nutritive quality, and thus they keep eating more, trying in vain to get what the body needs.