Weight gain

A few years ago, the FDA refused entry into the US to a large shipment of traditional Indian health potions and remedies They came with names like Chyavanprash, and were from some major manufacturers in India. Laboratory tests found that the health preparations in the shipment contained high concentrations of heavy metals, a sign of the careless and primitive herbal extraction processes used. These were destined for health stores around the country, where health and body building junkies look at the exotic Indian names, and throw them in their shopping carts. This isn’t an exception though; most health preparations and weight training supplements you find in any health store, that don’t come from the major pharmaceutical companies, are usually tainted with dangerous impurities, or are of dubious utility. And are all aimed at taking advantage of any of the health fads that come and go, at any gym around the country.  Weight training supplements, products with names like Weight Mass Explosion or Muscle Monster that are close to the hearts of many bodybuilders though, have been of especial interest to researchers recently.

As much interest as mainstream bodybuilders have in these, research more and more convincingly, has been demonstrating how protein-added powders and other weight training supplements, are of no utility, to anyone short of Mr. Universe-level bodybuilders, and even then, maybe not so much. At best, they waste your money that you could use to better effect elsewhere, and at worst, they can send you down the road to heart disease and kidney disease. Protein is something you need when you do resistance training, certainly. The entire process of putting on more muscle fiber or strengthening existing ones, involves subjecting your muscles to a little more than they can handle, and thus causing a little bit of injury. The protein in your diet will provide the body with what it needs to rebuild the muscle to be more strong.

Actually, it adds up quite easily. A regular bodybuilder who weighs about 200 pounds, unless he has world-beating ambitions, needs about a gram of protein for every kilogram of body mass. This, you could easily get with a little milk three times a day, a little side order of fish, and a normal sized steak. Anyone but the most insanely ambitious bodybuilder could even get by wonderfully on your standard vegetarian diet. The researchers did a survey of bodybuilders in gyms across the country, and found that half of them took weight training supplements, protein powders and the like. After testing them, the researchers found that not one of them needed to have taken any. And only one out of four could even really put together a coherent explanation for why they needed supplements. No regular person in America who doesn’t live in terrible poverty, suffers from any kind of protein deficiency.

The aggressively marketed weight training supplements, you’ll know them by their names to use, have plenty of calories in them too. A regular dose can can contain up to 1000 calories; whatever it does, it could actually get you out of shape. Other than that, clogging the body with protein it can’t use, is just an unnecessary strain on the kidneys; they have to convert all of them to urea. And the more the kidneys work on proteins, the more you’ll get kidney stones. Those can be pretty painful. Being a great bodybuilder is all about staying informed. It becomes very hard to maintain any kind of body at all, with sick set of kidneys.