CHAPTER 18

Sports and Fitness

Eating lots of lean protein to build muscle, look sexy, and stay trim?

Everyone’s heard that’s the way to go, but what if almost everything we’ve ever been taught about sports nutrition is wrong? What if all that lean protein brings short-term benefits but long-term harm? What if the simple step of drinking broth every day could optimize the health and longevity of bodybuilders, strength trainers, athletes, joggers, jocks, spinners, skaters, and weekend warriors?

Athletes have known for years that lean meat builds rippling muscles, but those muscles can come at a cost. High-protein diets can lead to deficiencies of fat-soluble vitamins as well as significant imbalances of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids. Those who choose lean proteins in the form of shake powders based on soy, pea, rice, whey, and other protein isolates can compound the risks by consuming MSG, nitrosamines, and other toxins and carcinogens created by modern, industrial processing techniques.

In contrast to these modern experiments, our healthy ancestors honored animals by eating all parts of them. They sucked out the marrow, favored the organ meats, chewed on the gristle, dipped deeply into the fat, and rejected lean cuts whenever possible. With the wisdom of instinct and experience, they knew their guts-and-grease diets conferred strength, endurance, and supreme good health.

Lean protein at its worst comes in the protein powders that first took off in the 1940s and 1950s. Portable and shelf stable, they seemed a practical solution for disaster relief and world hunger efforts and a profitable path for food manufacturers. For the vegetable oil industry, soy protein powders presented a way to profit from the protein left over from the manufacture of soy oil, margarine, and shortening.

Not surprisingly, bodybuilders in the pre–anabolic steroid era started adding powdered proteins to diets already high in protein. As Randy Roach explained in Muscle, Smoke and Mirrors, there was great economic incentive to promote soy as a perfect protein. Roach noted, however, that Vince Gironda, Armand Tanny, and other top competitors warned followers off the soy. Gironda pulled no punches when he called it “that s***!”

Prior to the 1990s, when soy was successfully marketed as a “miracle” food, most bodybuilders hedged their bets by taking mixes of soy, whey, and other protein powders along with raw eggs, milk, and other high-quality real foods. Many also took gelatin, a concentrate that bodybuilders had favored since the early twentieth century. Every morning, Steve Reeves, Mr. Universe 1947 and the star of Hercules and Hercules Unchained, stirred Knox gelatin faithfully into a breakfast shake of fresh orange juice, honey, banana, raw eggs, skim milk, egg white, and soy protein.

Gelatin and Strength

The gelatin prescription dates back to the era of Eugen Sandow, a Florenz Ziegfeld vaudeville star renowned for charisma, strength, and a finely chiseled physique. In his lifelong attempt to hack the secrets to bodybuilding, Sandow looked to science, and undoubtedly found the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century studies that suggested gelatin was the answer to world hunger, recovery from injury, and prevention of illness, and the cure-all of just about anything, including indigestion. Given that Sandow strongly believed in facilitating good digestion, adding gelatin to meals surely seemed a good insurance policy.

Some of Sandow’s colleagues recommended using “beef extract” for rapid muscle recovery, and strongman Arthur Saxon endorsed a beef gelatin product known as Bovril. Bovril ads ranged from illustrations of lively bulls with the words powerful and invigorating to a view of the pope blessing the meat tea and smiling at the caption “The Two Infallible Powers—the Pope and Bovril.” Whether Leo XIII had a beef with the ad is unknown, but the unmistakable message to the public was that Bovril conferred strength, virility, invincibility, and infallibility. Although a product of that name is still sold, its formula has devolved over the years from beef to beef-like, changes that can only have diminished the product’s alleged former superpowers.

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientists looked to gelatin as a solution for malnutrition and the muscle wasting of convalescence. In the 1930s, they turned to questions of strength and endurance. Leading the pack was Walter Meredith Boothby, MD (1880–1953), hired by the Mayo Clinic in 1917 to establish a laboratory of basal metabolism. He originally focused on the metabolism of patients with hypothyroidism and hyperthyroidism, but by 1934 he had turned his attention to muscle strength and endurance. Dr. Boothby found that 15 grams of glycine—a conditionally essential amino acid found abundantly in broth and gelatin—increased muscular strength and skill, delayed the onset of fatigue, and even restored the wasted muscle tissues in myasthenia gravis and related diseases.

Dr. Boothby’s finding was confirmed by Doctors G. B. Ray, J. R. Johnson, and M. M. Taylor at the Long Island College of Medicine—though none of them quite knew what to make of their finding that glycine seemed to increase the work output of men but not of women. The Long Island team also learned that patients who were unable to take high doses of glycine without discomfort did well on a commercial gelatin product containing about 25 percent glycine. A generous 30 grams of gelatin could be given in a single dose if mixed well into chilled orange juice.

A few years earlier, in 1932, Professor Lazar Remen at the University of Münster had also reported on glycine’s good effects on muscle. So did Regidius M. Kaczmarek, Professor of Physiology at the University of Notre Dame, who noted the “superior influence” of gelatin on athletes and nonathletes who pedaled bikes until they dropped from exhaustion. In Dr. Kaczmarek’s experiments, the gelatin-using athletes increased their average daily work output by 216 percent, but nonathletes by just 52 percent. Contrary to the findings of the Long Island Medical Center researchers, he reported gelatin exerted a “favorable influence” on “the girl subjects,” though this may have been due to their age (under seventeen and still growing) rather than gender. Dr. Kaczmarek reported that none of his subjects “manifested any gustatory dislike for or physiological intolerance of gelatin.”

Why gelatin increased endurance and “work output” was the burning question. The scientists jockeyed for power with various explanations. Given that Banting and Best had discovered insulin in 1921, theories on blood sugar and metabolism abounded. Gelatin fit perfectly into such discussions because its abundant glycine, glutamine, and alanine stores are glucogenic (that is, promote the release of glucose into the bloodstream), while its adequate arginine, cystine, proline, and serine are glycogenic (promote the storage of glucose). The Long Island College of Medicine Team rooted for glycine, because of its role as a creatine precursor, a theory that proved popular for a time but never quite held up.

Glycine and Endurance

Russell Morse Wilder, MD (1885–1959), of the Mayo Clinic, is remembered today for his pioneering diabetes research, metabolic studies, and creation of a ketogenic diet that stopped epileptic seizures. Dr. Wilder also weighed in on the glycine-endurance controversy: “I am satisfied that I have been capable of more sustained effort since taking glycine and other healthy subjects will tell the same story, but testimonial evidence such as this will not satisfy the critical mind. An ideal experiment would require two full companies of soldiers with an equally robust and equally well-trained personnel. If one company could then be fed glycine for from four to six weeks but the other not, and then if both companies could be subjected to a grueling march, the number of stragglers in each company would supply the objective evidence we need so badly. It is possible that such an experiment can be conducted by the medical officers at some army post.”

That soldier experiment never took place, and the confusion continued as researchers analyzed a large variety of studies, many of dubious design and value. One such effort compared the performance of a group of cyclists imbibing glycine-spiked wine with a control group on wine alone. (While glycine improved the performance, there is no evidence the subjects were any less drunk or might have benefited from the resveratrol content.) Not surprisingly, some researchers scratched their heads, threw up their hands, and resorted to talk about “psychological effects” or “training factors.” Nathan Gotthoffer, PhD, who probably found and meticulously reviewed every piece of gelatin research ever published for Gelatin in Nutrition and Medicine, didn’t buy that. The limits of exercise alone ought to have been readily apparent to anyone who reviewed the results of taking gelatin compared to sham feedings, he said. Even so, he was unable to draw any conclusions about the cause, and settled for noting that gelatin’s “positive effect” on strength and endurance “has been observed and is no doubt real.”

Given the confusion, it’s not surprising that gelatin never quite took off in the bodybuilding world. Many trainers and champions still recommended adding it to breakfast shakes, consuming bouillon to whet the appetite for weight-gaining meals, and eating soup to curb hunger on weight-loss diets, but it constituted only a minor part of the diet. The level was probably typical of that consumed by the general public. Knox Gelatin, after all, was successfully marketing its product as a helpmate in the kitchen and maker of strong, healthy nails.

He-Man Diets

Clearly, the results of bodybuilders cannot be extrapolated to the general population—or even to people who like to stay healthy, active, and fit. Bodybuilders, after all, represent a subset of the population, one that eats massive amounts of food, works out obsessively, and aspires to attain what many people consider freakish ideals of physical perfection. Even so, it’s interesting to ponder why all the emphasis on protein in the 1940s and 1950s did not lead to the deficiencies, imbalances, and health problems we see so widely today. The main reason was that the earlier “he-man” diets talked protein but included raw eggs, raw milk, liver, and plenty of other real foods. Although some bodybuilders supplemented with soy, whey, and wheat protein powders during those decades, the dietary foundation remained high-quality animal food, not fractionated processed and packaged products. Today’s obsession with shakes, smoothies, and energy bars is a new development.

Notably, raw milk was in the bodybuilding mix from the get-go. Sandow, Saxon, and other early greats recommended it, as did Bernarr MacFadden (1868–1955), the father of physical culture. MacFadden is often thought to have been a vegetarian because of all the beet juice, raw carrots, fruits, dates, raisins, grains, and nuts he grazed on. He ate small amounts of meat, however, and also drank copious amounts of raw milk, sometimes topping off at more than a gallon a day. He also recommended regular raw milk fasts, then a mainstream rejuvenation remedy endorsed by the Mayo Clinic. Less well known is the fact that he experimented with veganism, but found himself too weak to work out, and gave it up entirely after his wife first gave birth to an underweight baby and later suffered a miscarriage. MacFadden’s preaching about meat polluting the body with “impurities” then came to a stop, and he conceded we all need some red meat, at least once in a while.

Although most of the early superstar bodybuilders and trainers ate more meat than MacFadden, they all agreed on the importance of raw milk and cream. So did Vince Gironda, (1917–1997), the “Iron Guru” who came to prominence in the late 1940s as a bodybuilder and trainer to the stars. Gironda raised the nutritional bar by recommending dozens of eggs, gallons of raw milk, sticks of raw butter, blood-building liver, and bloody red meat.

Most of these men knew and respected the work of Robert McCarrison (1879–1962) and Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1878–1960). McCarrison investigated the food and lifestyle of the Hunza, a group who thrived on a mostly lacto-vegetarian diet that also included some meat and broth. Stefansson found good health among Arctic carnivores who ate all parts of the animal, complete with sucking on bone marrow and chewing on gristle. Their findings were widely publicized in the 1930s, the decade in which Weston A. Price, DDS, visited primitive cultures around the world and established clear relationships between diet and degeneration.

Somehow the bodybuilders missed the parts about primal diets valuing bones, gristle, marrow, and broth. But with so much raw milk in their diets, their emphasis on muscle meat did not lead to dietary failure. Milk contains glutamine, glycine, and proline, three conditionally essential amino acids found abundantly in broth and gelatin. Although these amino acids are present in gelatin powder at ten to twenty times the concentration found in other proteins, the bodybuilders consumed enormous quantities of milk, eggs, and meat. For people whose primary goal is to look trim and toned, such quantities would lead to overweight. Yet, without these choices, lean meat–oriented dietary regimens inevitably lead to deficiencies in glycine, glutamine, and other nutrients. Although a daily bowl of broth could easily solve the problem, most trainers don’t know that and instead recommend supplements.

Supplements for Bodybuilders

A particularly useful supplement is glycine, recommended for help with protein digestion, detoxification, wound healing, and a host of other metabolic needs. Because it’s a conditionally essential amino acid, the body can obviously make it, but there are many reasons to think that even normal healthy people might not be able to make enough. In 1985, researchers concluded that prolonged restriction of dietary protein or too little glycine and other amino acids could limit the capacity of tissues to form creatine, porphyrins, purines, and glutathione. Creatine, of course, has a huge impact on muscles, strength, and endurance. While this study might seem irrelevant in that few restrict their protein, diets that revolve around lean muscle meat provide a surplus of methionine, a deficiency of glycine, and an overall protein imbalance.

Another popular supplement among athletes is glutamine, the most abundant amino acid in the body and the third-highest amino acid found in broth and gelatin. Scientists looked hard at glutamine from the late 1970s through the 1980s and discovered that muscle cells contain high amounts of free glutamine. When glutamine is needed anywhere in the body to help address physical or emotional stress, the muscles give some up. As a result, glutamine stores are rapidly depleted when bodies are stressed from accident, injury, burns, illness, or overtraining. If glutamine is not quickly repleted by the consumption of meat, broth, gelatin, or other glutamine-rich foods, muscle wasting begins.

These findings have led many alternative physicians and other health practitioners to recommend glutamine supplements whenever the body is under stress, including stress from intense, exhausting exercise. For example, the glutamine levels in a runner’s blood will be reduced by around 20 percent after he or she completes a marathon. If the runner takes glutamine en route, however, this occurrence can be reduced or even prevented altogether. Bodies on glutamine recover from extreme exertion more quickly. Stressed-out athletes whose bodies go into acidosis can also benefit greatly from glutamine.

Furthermore, glutamine supports the immune system, helping physically stressed athletes resist colds, flu, and other infections. In terms of recovering from illness or injury, glutamine can help athletes and non-athletes alike. Added to IV feeding tubes in hospitals, glutamine promotes speedier healing and reduces muscle atrophy. As an oral supplement it can aid gut healing, reduce oxidative stress, speed postsurgical healing, and help patients rebound from debilitating cancer treatments.

Even so, some researchers have reported little beneficial effect from glutamine supplementation. How can that be? The most likely reason is that extra glutamine is not necessary, at least not in healthy, well-nourished individuals. As a conditionally essential amino acid, the body can make it, after all. But while optimally healthy people can make plenty of it and easily meet any increased needs, few of us today are healthy enough to rise to that challenge day after day. Under conditions of chronic physical and emotional stress, extra glutamine seems to make sense. Day to day, glutamine-rich broth can prevent such stress.

Glutamine can also prove useful as a precursor to the neurotransmitter GABA. When glutamine gets past the blood-brain barrier, it is metabolized either to glutamate (which is excitatory) or to GABA (which has a calming effect). Both are needed by the body and brain. GABA not only keeps people calm but helps them lose fat, gain muscle, increase energy, prevent muscle spasms, increase cardiac output, increase bone mass, increase exercise endurance, enhance sexual performance, and even produce human growth hormone (hGH). The hGH claim might seem a bit of a stretcher, but has actually interested researchers for decades. It comes from the fact that GABA plays a significant role in hypothalamic-pituitary function. The pituitary gland is the master endocrine gland affecting all hormonal functions of the body including growth hormone.

As discussed in chapter 9, numerous components found in broth can help with osteoarthritis, particularly the type known as secondary osteoarthritis, which is caused by athletic injury, trauma, accident, or repetitive motion.

Few sports nutritionists today tout gelatin, much less broth. Instead, collagen hydrolysate, a gelatin derivative that dissolves easily in both hot and cold water, has been in the news. Dr. Friedhelm Beuker of the Institute for Sports Sciences at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany; Dr. Klaus Seeligmuller, a specialist in orthopedics, sports medicine, and physical therapy in Bonn, Germany; James M. Rippe, MD, of the Rippe Lifestyle Institute in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts; and Kristine L. Clark, PhD, RD, a specialist in sports nutrition at Penn State, have all shown significant improvements for athletes suffering from joint pain after taking collagen hydrolysate.

Recovery from Injury

Training for any endurance, speed, or strength sport involves purposeful microtearing of tissue and inflammation. When all is well, repair takes place and the body comes back stronger. An exercise program that is too intense or does not allow sufficient recovery time, however, can lead to sprains, strains, stress fractures, and serious sidelining injuries.

“ Sports

I train in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a ground-fighting art that demands high flexibility and joint health. Since incorporating bone broths into my diet, I have had fewer injuries, and no serious ones, to my joints. I do not take supplements, so the bone broths are my way to get materials into my body that are beneficial for joints. Our bone broths are frequently made with wild animals, including ruffed grouse, wild turkey, and white-tailed deer, though we use pastured chickens and free-range sheep as well. We focus on the joints of larger animals so plenty of cartilage and connective tissue are simmered.

—Arthur Haines, Canton, Maine ”

The usual treatment for strains and sprains is NSAIDs and other anti-inflammatories. These can control the pain but come with a long list of side effects. Taking them regularly can lead to gastrointestinal tract upset, including stomach irritation, bleeding, and ulceration. Less common side effects include high blood pressure, kidney problems, and liver damage. Furthermore, their usage can defeat the very purpose of exercise in that NSAIDs accelerate the process of joint destruction by lowering the level of cartilage-healing prostaglandins, GAGs (glycosaminoglycans), and hyaluronic acid.

What to do instead? First of all, remember that injuries are most likely to happen to people who fail to warm up adequately, train too long or too often, lift overly heavy weights using poor form, or fail to take sufficient time off between workouts for healing and recovery. Next, prioritize proper nutrition. A nutrient-dense diet rich in broth not only helps build strong flexible bones, joints, tendons, and ligaments but helps us recover quickly from overuse or injury. With proper nutrition, appropriate exercise promotes health. Without it, exercise stress saps us of energy, accelerates the degenerative process, and can even cause crippling injury. As the inimitable William Campbell Douglass II, MD, puts it, “The next thing you know, you’re using whatever’s left of your strength to put tennis balls on your walker so it doesn’t scratch the floor.”

Although Dr. Douglass thinks it’s a lie that we need to “sweat, sweat, sweat in a gym,” the researchers at Tufts have proven that strong people stay young. While that’s partially about building biceps, abs, and quads, it applies to the muscles we can’t see as well, including those that power the heart. As with any lifestyle choice, we must balance possible benefits against proven risks.

Dr. Weston A. Price reported no aerobics classes or Nautilus machines in cultures where people lived long healthy lives without slack muscles, thin bones, and creaky joints. Yet exercise was a natural and consistent way of life. People hunted, gathered, fished, worked the fields, stretched, lifted, walked, and sprinted as part of their daily routine. Old and young alike found it impossible to avoid daily physical activity, a fact that impacted their impressive longevity, high levels of energy, and vibrant good health. We also know none of them dined on lean protein, shake powders, or pills. Clearly it’s time to up our nutritional game with a traditional diet rich in old-fashioned broth.