Can Protein Give Me the Energy I Need?
Protein is used in the sports world to provide a whole range of athletes with the energy they need. This has led the nutrition world to wonder whether protein can be just as good an energy provider as the carbohydrates and fat that our bodies also turn into glucose.
While the short term effects are quite clear at the moment, the long term still remains a mystery. While the general public believe that protein in the key to muscle building, we already know this to be false, but can it be the key to a higher level of energy while providing the body with a healthy diet?
Protein, a “macronutrient,” is needed to be kept at a fairly constant high level for us to function properly and get the right amount of nutrition that our bodies need.
While many people get their levels of protein from processed red meat, this also comes with a plethora of poor health issues, including a higher amount of cholesterol, saturated fat and an increased rate of cancer.
When looking to the vegan and vegetarian areas of society, it’s clear that while meat isn’t needed for a proper amount of protein, those who struggle to take in enough of the nutrient also see their energy levels suffer, showing that it can be important when it comes to the glucose levels in the human body.
While protein is important, you need to ensure that you’re not ingesting too much of it. Not only can this result in a sluggish feeling in the body, a higher protein diet can make many people neglect the other nutritional components they need.
This is because they will find their body is receiving a good amount of energy while also reducing their weight, leaving the more socially taboo fat and sugar dead in the water. However, our bodies need that fat and sugar, so to deprive them of that is to deprive yourself of true health.
The reason a high protein diet can leave you with high levels of energy but reduced weight is down to more effort needed by the body to process the protein into glucose, rather than the more easily converted fat and sugar. This means that there’s less calories left over for your body to turn into excess fat on the human body.
This would be a positive in most people’s books, but you have to be aware of the possible negatives that can come with this. When your body takes in a higher level of protein, not only are you likely to be neglecting the other essential nutrients, your body also starts to excrete various others such as calcium.
Let’s compare the effects with say, a high carbohydrate diet. A diet that relies heavily on carbohydrates will also provide you with the energy you need, being the main energy source in most human diets.
However, with this comes a possible increase in the level of weight and can lead to poor nutrition within a human body, cravings for certain foods and a general malaise or sluggishness that will often accompany the over consumption of any one thing.
A reliance on carbs can also bring on a serious imbalance in energy levels as well, leading to the complete opposite effect of what you’re looking for.
If you’re looking to rely entirely on protein, then you’ll probably find that your body will suffer in the long run. In the short term, your body will lose weight and you will feel a surge of energy within your body, but the long term effects haven’t been fully looked into to know how your body will be negatively affected.
Our bodies are tuned to run off a variety of things and to rely entirely on protein will probably see you eventually running into a wall somewhere down the road. To ensure that doesn’t happen, you need to make sure you ingesting a good amount of protein among a varied diet that provides you with all of the nutrition you need to have enough energy to get by during the day to day.
How Protein Consumption Provides Your Body with Energy
In the exercise world, especially among the bodybuilding community, a high protein diet can often be touted as the best possible way to get you in shape.
However, do we know exactly how this works within our bodies? Is there anything else that protein can do for us apart from provide us with energy? Should we really believe these food marketers who want us chomping down more protein in the hope of gaining ourselves some more energy?
Hopefully you’ll find answers to all of these of these questions and more below:
While protein is most widely thought of as the builder of muscle and the main building block for many important bodily functions, there are some who believe that a high protein diet can also imbue us with more energy.
Due to its classification as a “macronutrient,” our bodies are in constant need of a high level of protein anyway, but you may be surprised to find out exactly what it’s doing within your body.
For example it’s generally believed, as stated above, that protein will help you pile on the muscle, but we now know that the only thing that will bring on the muscle is exercise. This means that when you’re throwing down a large steak in a restaurant in the hope of grabbing yourself some protein, you’re likely just giving yourself too much of the good stuff along with a high level of bad stuff like saturated fat. We can see then, that protein is a generally misunderstood commodity.
The reason some nutritionists err on the side of caution regarding high protein diets that neglect other, much-needed nutrition, is down to short-term weight loss and long-term health issues. What starts out in a reduction of water weight can turn into high levels of ammonia within the body and nobody fully understands what the risks of this could be.
While this may not seem like a huge issue to anyone considering a higher protein diet, but this worry surrounds the body seemingly excreting many different things alongside the high levels of ammonia, including calcium. In a sense, cutting out carbohydrates and replacing them with protein is likely to throw your body into a fairly bad place.
Now, this being said, there’s also a lot of good about proteins that we haven’t yet talked about. Nutritionists believe that a short term hit of high protein, say six months, can yield great results within the body.
The weight loss you feel when you take on a high protein diet is from the higher difficulty the body has turning it into glucose. When it takes the body more energy to create the glucose, it means there’s less calories left over than when the body turns carbohydrates or fat into the all-important energy your body is running on all day everyday
To flesh out exactly how protein becomes fuel for your body, you have to look at how the gastro-intestinal tract turns the ingested protein into amino-acids for your body. In this way, your body is able to turn the protein, but hopefully not excess protein, into energy for your body.
This is interesting because not many people see protein as being an energy source, usually looking to carbohydrates on sugar to fill that role. This isn’t always the case though, as you will often see that those taking part in sports are at an optimal level when they’re taking in a higher level of protein, as it allows them to continue to exercise and perform the best when they need it.
You will often find that too much protein is bad for you, but then by definition too much of anything is as well. If you’re wondering whether the protein in your diet is providing you with energy that you can likely cut out in the form of carbohydrates or sugar, then you’d probably be able to.
That being said, never rely entirely on one type of nutrient, and always be aware that your body is being provided many important things through your diet that you should never be without.
How a High Protein Snack can Give You More Energy than Sugary Foods
We can probably all agree that it’s hard to get by in this life without our little pleasures. Whether you need a pack of cigarettes to get through the day or you can’t get through a week without a few pints, there’s nobody out there who doesn’t have a little crutch.
For a lot of people, this comes in the form of snacking on sugary food, which gives them the double whammy of a pleasant feeling and a small energy boost. However, this can often be bad for you, especially if you’re going overboard on the sugar on a weekly basis. Don’t despair though, because there might be a solution to your problem in the form of protein.
Unlike other nutrients, protein is a “macronutrient,” meaning that you need to keep it at high levels to maintain a healthy diet. Some people get their daily protein from their main meals throughout the day, but this often comes in the form of processed red meat that is loaded with saturated fat and increases your chances of certain cancers.
By looking at those living on a vegan and vegetarian diet, it’s easy to see how people can find their protein hit mainly from small snack throughout the day, through things such as nuts and pulses, leaving the veg to their main meals most of the time.
Obviously, someone who snacks on protein heavy meals will also find themselves struggling with other issues such as sluggishness, but they will also have less of a crash and see a reduction in weight loss. This is due to their body taking on the protein, turning it into energy with twice as much effort than sugar and leaving a lot less calories behind to turn into fat.
Sugar allows the body a quick rush of energy but is arguably worse for the body and your body won’t thank you once that quick rush runs out. We need a good mixture of nutrition in our bodies while also knowing that protein can provide us with a longer lasting energy that can sustain you throughout the day and keep you healthy in a way that sugar just can’t.
Now if we compare this to someone who is consistently snacking on sugar, we can see that while the immediate sugar rush may seem like it blows the protein snacks out of the water they actually can provide enough energy while sustaining it for longer.
Alongside this, sugar can lead to a plethora of health effects, such as tooth decay and diabetes. The tooth decay is one of the most obvious negatives that comes from the use of sugar for energy, leading to some serious issues if it’s not properly looked after. Even with constant brushing, too much sugar will get to them!
The increase of insulin that comes with a high sugar diet regularly leads to diabetes. Compared to tooth decay, this is a more serious issue that will hit you hard if you don’t watch out for your intake of sugar.
When you’re younger, it seems like a poor diet will never touch you, but as you get older you can be sure that excessive snacking on sugary treats will definitely come back to bite you. Make sure you’re not one of the people struggling in your late years due to bad diet.
If you’re not looking to start living off just protein or sugar, or even any other form snack that you’re relying on during your day to day routine at the moment, then you’ve probably got nothing to worry about.
As you’ve learned while reading this report, living off any one form of snack in the hope of achieving all day energy is seriously misguided in the long run, but if you’re looking to pull back on the sugary snacks for the sake of your health, then you now know there’s a lot of alternatives open to you.
Why live off something unhealthy when you can start to change your ways that will can result in healthy, long-term effects?
