Protein, Muscle and Quality of Life

Protein, Muscle and Quality of Life.

Muscle. Getting bigger muscles is often what comes to mind when the subject of eating protein is mentioned. You might picture a gym full of sweaty people lifting bars with huge stacks of weights – pausing only long enough to admire themselves in the big mirrors on the walls while they chug specially formulated protein drinks.

Getting bigger muscles to improve one’s appearance is not necessarily a bad motivation to do resistance training, however there are other reasons why everyone should work towards building and preserving muscle. Our overall health and function is dependent on how well we build and preserve muscle mass and strength throughout our lives.

Muscle is just as important to the 82 year old trying to get up off the ground after a fall as it is a 22 year old wanting to attract a mate by getting bigger biceps or growing their glutes.

Muscle serves a tremendously important role in our stability. Having adequate muscle mass and working our muscles through resistance training not only can help us get back up off the ground after we fall – but to not fall in the first place. Our posture, the stability of our joints, the way we move through space, our ability to not just move quickly but to stop quickly all are dependent on a healthy muscular system.

Muscle serves many other roles. It helps us maintain our body temperature. Breathing would not happen without the diaphragm. Muscles between the ribs assist us in breathing as well. Our gut uses muscles to move food and waste. We use muscles to urinate. Muscles help protect our internal organs.

Muscle plays a key helping role in our circulatory system. First of all of course is the heart itself which a bulk of the heart is muscle tissues. A different type of muscle; smooth muscle, forms part of our blood vessels especially arteries allowing the blood vessels to open up or constrict as needed. Skeletal muscle is also important for blood circulation. Leg muscles squeeze on veins pushing blood back to the heart.

Our muscular system plays a key in our metabolic health. I will explore this topic in much more detail in a later article but one quick interesting fact is that after eating about 80% of the glucose (“blood sugar”) coursing through your blood vessels will get taken up into muscle tissue. Muscle is key to glucose metabolism.

We must have adequate protein in our diet to maintain and build muscle. If we don’t get enough protein in our diet we will break down muscle to get the building blocks to make all of the other proteins we must have or die. What might not be well appreciated by most of us is that the making and breaking down of our body’s proteins including muscles happens all the time – no matter what we do.

The breaking down of proteins is not such a bad thing. Proteins go bad and when they do they need to be replaced. This happens all the time. We replace enzymes, antibodies, messenger proteins, cell surface receptors and muscle proteins; just to name a few, all the time. Our protein rich red blood cells and white blood cells are continuously being born and dying.

Our body gets rebuilt over and over again.

When we eat carbohydrates and fats we break them down and store up what we do not use right away. Carbohydrates are stored in the form of glycogen in our liver and muscles to use for energy. For the most part unless you are running a marathon – you will not run out of glycogen. We store fats as fat. Most of us have a nearly unlimited supply of body fat to draw from when we need fatty acids.

Protein does not get stored up in the same way as fats and carbohydrates. We use the building blocks we get from protein to make stuff. One could say our muscles and other structures are how we store protein building blocks but I don’t think that is a good way of thinking about the system. If you have a brick house with a fireplace and  brick chimney and the top of the chimney tumbles due to age or from a storm – you will need bricks to rebuild the chimney. There will be bricks available from the constant breaking down and rebuilding of the walls of your house but that might place a stress on other systems if you do not get in enough new bricks.

If you eat more protein, will you get bigger muscles? It would seem like a reasonable assumption to say that the more dietary protein you put into the system the more and better bodily proteins you get including bigger muscles. This is a topic I will address in depth in later articles.  In the next article I will talk about another major organ system that has a high protein demand; the skin (integumentary system). If you are ready to read that article click here. If this is the first Health Matters article you have read; consider going back to the beginning and read the introductory articles by clicking here.

Learn more about basic muscle structure in this 2 minute video. Notice the complex repetitive organization and how there are many different structures mentioned in this 2 minute video. Know that all of these  structures such as the connective tissues are largely made of protein.

Check out this less than 3 minute video on how muscles work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVcgO4p88AA 

Want to learn even more about muscle go to my “All About Muscle” page. I am still working on building this page so it is “under construction” but check out what I got there now.

Thanks for joining me in this educational adventure.

Russ

Just for fun check out this video. The website “The Music Man” reports there were 700 guitarists strumming this tune. It was filmed during a guitar festival in September of 2023. This festival was in Romania performing a song created and recorded more than 50 years ago by a band halfway around the globe. Love seeing the mix of ages.

English is not the official language of Romania but it does not seem to matter when it comes to enjoying music. The official language of Romania is Romanian which resembles Italian. Romania shares borders with Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Hungary and Serbia. Romania has beaches on The Black Sea – a body of water that covers a much larger area than all of the Great Lakes. Learn more about Romania here.