BCAAs & Self-Induced Experimentation

I began doing aerobics many years ago when I had my triple herniated disc "issue" and couldn't walk from the pain for about a year. When it got better enough I started doing aerobics with weights in the house to build up my stomach and back muscles. I wanted to gain mass, but it never happened.

I then started cycling more, but that just made me leaner as well. Then I took up weight lifting figuring that would put the muscle on me. Well, it has only made me stronger, but my weight doesn't change, and although when the body fat goes down, my muscles just pop out, the size of them... doesn't seem to change and my weight never changes! I wanted to get bigger!

So I changed and went to a different style of weight training. And recently have been doing an adaptation of that back in the gym.

FINALLY, I think I have put actual weight due to muscle mass on! Yaaay! The problem is that the weights I do are so intensely heavy (460lbs shrugs, as an example) that I am TOTALLY wiped out for about the next five days.

I tried taking whey protein but it just gave me massive gas, so I gave that up. I am not a big fan of "weight lifting supplements" because just like traditional nutrition beliefs, most of the weightlifting stuff is also fraught with completely misunderstood science so that what they tell you in the gym is in more cases than not, ... um... WRONG.

Well, I decided to give supplementation another try and I asked what they would recommend. Several of the serious guys in there said they all take BCAA and it really helps. "What's BCAA?" I asked. "BCAA!" They answered. So I took to the net to find out. The information I gathered was interesting, and a bit disturbing at the same time given my deeper understanding of how the body works, and how insulin affects us.

I decided to give it a try, though, for the next few months and see if it makes a difference. I can tell you that it makes a HUGE difference with respect to energy and recovery. Phenomenal. What took a week to recover, I can do in almost half that time now! That is impressive. But there's more, and it pertains to what I found out when I did some researching to find out exactly what BCAA stands for.

I am experiencing something very interesting now when I take the BCAA (branched chain amino acids)... Here is how one website explains the benefits of these BCAAs in training:

You probably know that amino acids are the building blocks of protein. When you eat a protein food, it gets digested in the stomach and intestine into individual amino acids and short chains of amino acids that are small enough to be absorbed into the bloodstream. These amino acids have far reaching effects in the body from building and repairing tissues, to producing chemicals that enable our brains to function optimally.

Essential amino acids cannot be made by the body. You must get them from complete protein foods or combinations of incomplete vegetable foods. There are 9 essential amino acids: histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, tryptophan, and valine. Your body can make non-essential amino acids by itself from vitamins and other amino acids.

The term "non-essential" can be misleading since all amino acids are essential for proper metabolism and certain non-essential amino acids, such as glutamine, become very essential. The 13 non-essential amino acids are alanine, arginine, aspartic acid, cysteine, cystine, glutamic acid, glutamine, glycine, hydroxyproline, proline, serine, & tyrosine.

The essential branched chain amino acids (BCAA's) are of special importance for athletes because they are metabolized in the muscle, rather than in the liver. Here's how this works: After digestion once protein is broken down into individual amino acids these aminos can either be used to build new proteins or be burned as fuel to produce energy. (See here for reference).

I like this concept since I have never been able to gain any muscle mass no matter what I try...

It seems when I researched what BCAA actually is (branched chain amino acids - the "essential" three), an article on BCAAs in Wikipedia said that these three are responsible for insulin production to "initiate a cascade effect" in the body which leads to muscle production. and when taking these essential AAs, the pancrease goes into insulin production. But it doesn't do it just a little bit... it does it "221%" more efficiently! Wow! As Rob said, it seems that these essential amino acids "squeeze the pancreas" and force out more insulin than under ordinary circumstances.

Now if this were the only use of insulin, it might be really exciting. However, as we know, there is a very powerful downside to insulin production...

Connecting this information to our carbohydrate and fatty acid knowledge, wouldn't you say that is ... a bit frightening? Because we know that excessive production of this stuff is caused when we eat a big dose of carbs (sugars) which gives us the highs, the lows, and also why we gain 10lbs from such a teeny bit of daily intake of snacks (isn't that maddening? Don't you wish you had to eat one pound of delicious cake to gain a pound of fat? Alas it doesn't seem to work that way as the body keep kicking out the fat... - this will become a blog btw when I come back... hope you don't mind). Insulin is the fat storage hormone (another name for it). Too much constant insulin production, and the pancreas gets tires, then cannot function properly... and blam! you become type 2 diabetic and your body can no longer excrete the insulin it needs to handle the huge amounts of poisonous sugars (in the form of carbs) that we are ingesting these days. Thus the rampant increase of obesity, AND diabetes around the globe (here in Japan, too!, and why cat diabetes never existed before but now it's apparently a very big problem - because commercial cat (and dog for that matter) food contains tons of grains and fibers, something true carnivores can absolutely NOT digest).

But the really interesting thing is that when I take this stuff, it gives me tremendous recovery the next day. I like that a lot because with the extremely heavy weights I use, my booty ... oops... body is wiped out for at least five days. With BCAA supplementation I don't get that. I ALSO don't fall asleep in mid-workout from the intensity just wiping me out right there on the spot!

Yesterday I did pilates again (it kicked my butt... I'm beat...). Sunday I did my upper body heavy workout at the gym. On both days I took the recommended dose of the BCAA powder (5g / 25kg body weight during). I took 5g before, 5g during, and 5g after. And it was wonderful both times (though it made me sweat and I don't usually sweat during workouts so something exciting is activated in my body!)

Now... where the diabetic friends come in is here...

What I want to know is what happens to diabetics who end up taking too much insulin? Not the extreme amount where they go into a coma, but what kinds of symptoms do they get when their blood sugars drop low due to over-dosing the insulin? Not the low sugar symptoms, but the high insulin symptoms. That's what I would like to know about.

Why?

Well... as I said above, some strange things are happening in this "experiment". I am finding that every time I take this stuff, the same thing is happening. At night I get extremely dehydrated. My mind gets kind of "racey", my sleep patterns are very restless, and I wake up in the morning with "cotton mouth".

(The reason why I wrote this blog this morning at 7am was because my brain was still racing from the night, and it was rather uncomfortable... I needed to get it out on paper to calm it down...)

This happens when I have carbs these days and I always thought it was due to overdosing on carbs because when I don't have the "big carbs" I don't wake up with "cotton mouth". But you know what? Even though I'm not "carbing", when I take these BCAAs, I end up with every symptom of a carb overdose that I know.

So, I am thinking that the "carb overdose symptoms" (see above for explanation)  might be, rather than the carbs, the actual overdose of insulin at work because BCAAs, if what that original article stated is correct, induces the body to produce more insulin.

If this is the case (and like I said I need to do more real experimentation - like use up this entire supply of BCAA and record what happens on nights that I have taken, and have not taken the BCAA during workouts and non-workout days), then BCAAs could potentially be inducing the same climate that causes people to develop Type II Diabetes... mainly an overproduction of insulin, causing the pancreas to eventually shut down and not function properly.

Insulin has a sharp crystalline form and these crystals are also known to scar the inside of the arteries as they flow through the blood, doing their job of reducing the excessive sugar in the bloodstream that we put there from too much carbohydrate (sugar). This then causes our body to create cholesterol (yes, we NEED cholesterol) which goes to these areas of scarred cell walls, sticks to them, and allows repair and healing to occur. As you know, cholesterol is sticky, and it can build up, leading to arteriosclerosis, or a hardening of the arteries, another very common disease we face these days (blamed on cholesterol, but the problem is mis-labeled).

Sugars in the bloodstream decrease the flow of oxygen as well. With a decreased flow of oxygen in the blood we end up with the cells not getting enough oxygen. And when cells have 30% less oxygen, their function changes from aerobic (using oxygen) to anaerobic, or fermentative (using sugar) to unction. When this happens, the cells become cancerous, as proven over and over by Dr. Otto Warburg over 60 years ago.

So basically, what I'm trying to say here, is that these BCAAs seem to be inducing the same results that a high carb meal would cause: overproduction of insulin to reduce the sugar in the blood. And this overproduction of insulin leads to a LOT of the illnesses that we see today in society; the "big illnesses" as we could say, the killers.

This is VERY interesting to me, and as I forked out the money for this not-cheap stuff, I intend to suffer through the cotton mouth until I finish this container. I'll do some testing while taking it during workouts, without working out, and not take it while I work out as well, just to see how I respond and whether or not the racing, dehydrated, cotton mouth correlates with the BCAA ingestion or not.

This entire blog is based on four times taking the BCAAs, so, being the scientist that I was trained, I want to do some more experimenting and see what happens... I'll let you know.

I'm off to catch the train to meet Pandasu in Kyoto for another Great Internet Axe Murderer's Convention!

I love you!

Cam

P.S. If you bodybuild, and take BCAAs, please think about any similar effects you may have with this and let me know the next time you "self-supplement". It might not be something you have paid much attention to before, either. Also if you take a lot of carbohydrates you may find that the burst of EAAs, (Essential Amino Acids) are helping you to stay "porpoisine" over those lovely strong muscles. Ever notice how so many really heavy building guys look like... dolphins?