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25.05.2010

Protein breakfast is an anabolic breakfast

If you eat pure protein first thing in the morning, your body will produce more anabolic hormones like growth hormone and insulin than if you breakfast on a mix of protein, carbohydrate and fat. What's more, protein meals lower your cortisol levels. Endocrinologists at the university of Erlangen-Nuremburg in Germany discovered this when they did a human study.

The researchers gave men aged between 18 and 40 a mixture of 24 g amino acids dissolved in a glass of water, at 8 o'clock in the morning. The mixture contained the amino acids Val, Leu, Ile, Phe, Tyr, Try, Lys, Met, Cys, Thr and His, as well as vitamins, minerals and trace elements. It was an SHS International product. Test subjects in control groups ate nothing [fasting control group] or were given skimmed milk that contained the same amount of joules as the amino acid shake [iso control group]. The energy in the milk powder meal was derived primarily from carbohydrates and secondly from protein.

The pure protein breakfast caused a high GH peak: the concentration rose on average by a factor 21, and remained high for about an hour and half in most subjects. Bear in mind that values on the y-axis of the graph below rise logarithmically.

No doubt meals composed of protein alone also cause a similar GH peak, although probably not so pronounced. Could be interesting for athletes and life extensionists. So make your breakfast and/or lunch as high proteins as possible, and your GH production will soar, along with your IGF-1.

The amino acid breakfast also lowered the subjects' cortisol levels. By the end of the experiment, the cortisol level of the amino acid group had halved, whereas the cortisol level of the subjects in the milk powder group had only gone down by about ten percent.

Many natural strength athletes consume regular small meals consisting entirely or almost entirely of protein. They prefer to take in their carbohydrates during the meals just before and after training sessions. One argument against this pattern is that your insulin only rises after you've eaten carbohydrates, and insulin is a strongly anabolic hormone.

A German study however shows that when it comes to meals containing split amino acids the argument doesn't hold up. The amino acids make the insulin level rise more than a milk-powder carbohydrate meal.

Source:
J Endocrinol. 2003 Nov;179(2):237-44.

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