ALL ABOUT CARBOHYDRATES

By: Mujuthaba

Let me try and explain carbohydrates in simplest of terms. Carbohydrates are one of the major nutrients which fuel our body, much like a steam engine that runs on coal. Most foods such as flour, rice, potatoes, taro, grains, oats, fruits and vegetables are composed of carbohydrates. One of the simplest functional forms of carbohydrate is glucose.

How is carbohydrate extracted by the body from food?

Well, when you intake a carbohydrate rich meal, we all know it goes straight to the stomach. The stomach churns and grinds the food very finely to expose every bit of the nutrients. Glucose, one of the most important simplest carbohydrates, is exposed during this time. As the now semi-solid meal passes out into the intestines. The nutrients needed by the body, such as glucose, are sucked up by the intestines straight into the blood stream.

How are carbohydrates stored in the body?

The glucose travels through the blood stream in the body. The blood is a transport system which acts like a delivery truck. This truck delivers glucose to all the cells in the body that needs it, particularly the muscles and liver. Inside the liver and muscle cells, the glucose is packed and stored for use, such as exercise and just to keep one self alive and functioning. The packed and stored glucose is now known as glycogen. If stored in the muscles, these are known as muscle glycogen. If in the liver, liver glycogen.

How are carbohydrates used to do work?

Ah, the big question. The stored glycogen is taken off the package, which then would be called glucose again, is ‘burned’ to create energy for functioning. Just picture a steam engine running on coal. The coal is glucose and the engine is the body. The more coal, the better the engine runs; the lesser the coal, the slower it runs. So in daily life, if you feel weak, you can assume your body is low on fuel, which are carbohydrates.

Why do we still keep on moving even if we don’t intake carbohydrates?

The body uses fuel from two other sources of nutrients, they are fats and proteins. None of them are as efficient as carbohydrates in producing energy to do work. To extract energy from proteins and fats, they have to be converted to glucose, the simplest form of functional carbohydrate. If proteins and fats are not converted to glucose (carbohydrate), we cannot get energy from them. This conversion is mainly processed in the liver, only when the body is low on glucose. Since these processes are so slow, the body would not function as fast or quickly. Hence, it is important to take carbohydrates rather than rely on diets comprising proteins or fats.

How important are Carbohydrates for survival?

The most important organ in the body, the brain, functions only on blood glucose. The brain doesn‘t have fat stores around it, or it doesn’t use its own cells to produce energy. If we have low glucose in our blood, we start feeling drowsy and in some instances faint. This is what happens during extremely intense training sessions when you feel like you’ve hit the wall. Most of the glucose is delivered to the exercising muscle cells, and before the truck reaches the brain, there is simply no glucose for the brain.

Even in such case, the brain isn’t starved yet. Our brains are very intelligent on survival. When the brain senses the first sign of low blood glucose in the body, it shuts down the whole body, simply because it has control over them. This will ensure that the brain gets the glucose. At this stage, we would probably have fainted. Drowsiness is the onset of gradual shutting down of the body by the brain.

How does carbohydrates makes us fat?

As stated before, carbohydrates are stored in the liver and muscles as glycogen. When these houses are full, the carbohydrates need to be stored in huge warehouses. This is when carbohydrates are converted to fat and stored in the fat stores for future use. If they are not used, they simply bulk up without any limit. Consideration should be taken not to consume carbohydrate in access. They will definitely increase your fat stores.

In conclusion, carbohydrates should be used adequately daily, especially if you are active exercisers. You will feel the difference if you are deprived of carbohydrates.

My Nine Rules for the Healthy Diet

By: Mujuthaba

I have had a lot of people asking me, ‘why don’t I get any changes to my body even though I work-out?’ The answer to it is a follow-up on the diet. Joining a gym is not a way of getting into a healthy lifestyle. You have to have discipline at the dining table too. Avoiding the diet is one of the major mistakes exercisers do. Follow these simple nine rules and get back on the right track, see how things change after that.

1. Do not skip meals: Do not take two or one big meal daily. If you starve yourself a bunch of negative things happen. Firstly, if you starve, the body is ready to store more energy (fat) to cope with starvation. So the next time you start eating, the body tends to store more weight. Most people also tend to eat a huge meal after starving, which also helps gain weight. Secondly, you will be starved of a lot of basic vitamins and minerals that is needed by the body for normal daily functioning. Thirdly, less daily meals lowers the metabolic rate further.
2. Take six small meals daily: How about this, eat more meals. Six meals are supposed to be small meals. Avoid large meals. This amount of meals increases the metabolic rate rapidly. You need to be careful at the type of food you eat. Small six meals won’t make you hungry. You can start a meal as early as you like, but none late into the night. If you want to eat something at night, eat a fruit.
3. Low energy and low fat food: From now on, look closer at the food you eat. When you start buying food, look at the labels. Buy replacements for your normal food supply with the low fat products. When you choose low fat, take a look at the total energy/calorie on the label too. Buy the replacement with lowest energy/calorie count on the label. One thing you have to remember is that people make the mistake of avoiding fat, but not the total energy in foods. How much you avoid fat, and refuse to be careful about the total energy, there would be no weight-loss.
4. More Fruit and Vegetables: Awesome source of nutrients. Eat a colourful fruit or make a fruit mix with low fat natural yoghurt. Whenever you feel like eating something, make sure you have a fruit on hand instead of a piece of cake. Well, vegetables. Now comes the salads. You could make salads, with olive oil and replace the dressings with those new ‘lite’ dressings in the market.
5. Cut Down on Fast food: Avoid the deep fried fish and chips, burgers, fried short eats...etc. You can have fast food at least once a week. Make this a rule in your first dieting step. Excess fast food can be detrimental to your training results.
6. Careful on MSG: Have you heard of this before? MSG (Mono-Sodium-Glutamate) is used as a flavour in foods. This is actually used in laboratory tests to make normal lab rats obese or over-weight. If it makes lab rats obese in a short time, it’s going to have the same effect on humans too.
7. Hydrate yourself: By the time you feel thirst, your body would have already lost a litre of crucial fluid for body functioning. So, thirst is not a good indication of dehydration. It’s an indication of a body in desperation for fluid. A number of functions in the body would have been impaired by the time you feel thirst.
8. Take a Multi-vitamin: It is always very easy to get deprived of nutrients when you are on a weight-loss program. So professionals in this area recommends a multi-vitamin to be taken daily as the only supplement. So it is wise, and I would also recommed to use a multi-vitamin daily.
9. Swap Sugary drinks: Replace the soft-drinks with coffee, tea and fresh juice. Caffeine in coffee helps to mobilise the fat stores. Tea is really healthy and contains a number of anti-oxidants. One cup of tea has more anti-oxidants than a serving of broccoli or carrots. So why have a soft drink in a cafe’ or restaurant?

Let’s hope these simple guidelines keep you on the right track for weight-management.

Creating Creatine

By: Mujuthaba

Creatine has been around for a while as a supplement in our health and fitness shops. This has been proven to be a quite popular supplement, especially among our body builders. The intake of creatine as a supplement came into action after the 1992 Olympics, where a couple of gold medallists used it for their success. I’m not sure about the Maldives, but in the world, the consumption of creatine is supposed to be an estimated three million kilograms a year. From this you can fathom the popularity of this supplement.

Creatine is a non-essential nutrient, 95% of which is present naturally in our muscles. These include the heart muscles, skeletal muscles and smooth muscles (lining of the intestines...etc). The remaining 5% are based in the brain, liver, kidneys and testes of males. The naturally occurring creatine is orally derived from diets containing fish and red meat. This could prove a challenge to vegetarians (not that we have many in our country), who would only get trace amounts of creatine from plant foods.

Creatine is mainly used in muscle contraction of the human body. This is a major element which makes short burst activities possible, for durations lasting 10-12 seconds. Usually in sports performance, supplements are used to increase overall performance by increasing the naturally occurring form of the nutrients. Aim of supplementing creatine is to increase the duration at which the muscles can perform at a 100% maximum. A normal person can use their muscles at maximum for no more than 10-12 seconds. You can experience this when you start on a full sprint, and after a while you would need to slow down as you would not have enough creatine available. I’m trying to explain this in very basic terms without getting into any detail of muscle movement using creatine.

Creatine is mainly ingested as a supplement in powdered form of creatine monohydrate. It has been proven that proper supplementation of creatine increases the muscle creatine concentration by 40%. The recommended intake or loading of creatine supplement is 20g/day. This amount should be taken in 5g at four different times for six continuous days. After the six days are complete, a dose of 2g/day is enough to keep the level of muscle creatine at a higher level. Increasing the dosage doesn’t have any effect on improving performance. This method of loading is also recommended in creatine supplement containers. Creatine, being a protein, it is always helpful for it to be used by the tissues if taken with a carbohydrate. Most athletes ingest this supplement by mixing with high carbohydrate drinks.

Supplementing creatine is useful in short burst sports, such as squash, gymnastics...etc. Although it doesn’t have much proven effect on performance for endurance sports, such as long distance running. Creatine has a tendency to increase the body weight by 0.5-3.5kg. This is mainly due to its effect on retaining water in tissues, increased protein production and decreased protein breakdown. This would prove to be positive effects if you are a body builder, since protein is the building blocks of the body structure. Creatine supplementation has also proven to increase strength of weight trainers by 25% and increase their fat free mass (muscles and bone mass) by 60%.

As with all other supplements, creatine doesn’t come without detrimental effects from over loading or individual ignorance. Such ailments as nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, kidney complications, liver complications, muscle cramps and increased blood pressure have been linked to creatine supplementation. Creatine supplementation should be taken into good consideration. Creatine has been proven to be one of the most effective supplements in the market, with almost no side-effects (with proper loading) and a history of exemplary results.