Bulletin No. 40, Programmed For Success: Supplementation For Optimal Results

Parrillo Performance Products
(800) 344-3404

In the last bulletin I presented a general overview of the Parrillo Nutrition Program, and this month I want to extend that discussion by talking about strategies to maximize your results by adding nutritional supplements to your diet. People often ask if nutritional supplements are necessary. The answer here is based on an individual’s diet, training intensity and goals. If you are eating a well-balanced diet, supplying all the nutrients your body needs through food, and your level of training activity is such that you never deplete certain nutrients, you may find that supplements are not necessary. However, many people, whether they are eating healthy or not, do not receive all the nutrients necessary to support intense training and growth. And that extends all the way to the bodybuilder, whose nutritional needs far exceed those of the average, sedentary person. So supplements can be used to prevent deficiencies in the diet. But there is still another level of supplementation. That is, are supplements required to achieve optimal results? Are supplements needed to reach your ultimate potential? The answer to this question for most hard-training athletes is yes!

Few bodybuilders (if any) make it to an advanced level without using nutritional supplements. They can’t afford not to. Let’s face it, if two men eat the same diet and train the same way, but one of them enriches the nutrient density of his diet by adding high quality supplements, which one do you think will get better results? When you’re training that hard and that much, you’re really pushing your body to it’s limit. The goal in training is to apply a maximum stress, so that your body is forced to adapt and grow. This kind of training pushes your recovery ability to its limit, and your ability to recover is what determines how fast you can grow. Rest and nutrition are what your body needs to recover from intense workouts. Supplements allow you to increase the cellular levels of nutrients beyond what can be obtained from whole foods alone. Supplements are simply ultra-concentrated nutrients, and adding them to a healthy diet of natural foods increases the nutrient density of your diet. It makes sense that increasing the amount of nutrients delivered to your muscles will help them recover and grow faster.

When I started putting together my formulas for supplements, I conducted my own experiments with bodybuilders and other athletes. During this experimentation process we introduced certain nutrients into the athletes’ diet, then pulled them back out, all the while noting the action and reaction this had in their training and physique. This is how I found out what worked and what didn’t in competitive athletes. Nothing fancy, just simple trial and error. But by trying different combinations of nutrients, we were able to optimize the formulas for maximum effect in lean muscle mass.

To incorporate supplements into your diet, Essential Vitamin Formula and Mineral-Electrolyte Formula are the starting point. My vitamin and mineral formula is the only one designed to be taken at each meal. One reason I did it this way is very simple: Since you need the vitamins and minerals to assist and control the molecular processes associated with metabolizing and synthesizing food, it only makes sense that you provide those vitamins and minerals with the food you are eating. Makes sense, right? Another reason I did it that way was because the water soluble vitamins (the B group and vitamin C) are excreted from your body in your urine within 3-4 hours after you take them, so levels drop back down again. By taking vitamins with each meal, this provides a more steady and constant blood level. It also ensures you’ll have all the vitamins around you need to help incorporate dietary protein into new muscle tissue after each meal. This makes more sense to me than taking a huge dose of vitamins every morning and excreting most of them by noon. Each Mineral-Electrolyte tablet contains 250 mg of calcium per tablet, so that by taking four a day you can meet the RDA for calcium. I also fortified my vitamins with large amounts of the anti-oxidants: vitamin C, vitamin E, and beta-carotene. These seem to help aid recovery by neutralizing free radicals (reactive oxygen species) generated during exercise. Free radicals are reactive molecules containing oxygen, which can damage cells and protein molecules. The anti-oxidant vitamins prevent this damage by binding to and neutralizing the free radicals. Each Parrillo Essential Vitamin tablet has 500 mg vitamin C, 200 IU vitamin E, and 5,000 IU beta-carotene. Each Mineral tablet contains 25 mcg chromium picolinate to stabilize blood sugar and optimize insulin function. Again, it makes more sense to take a small dose of chromium with each meal instead one big dose once a day. Of course, our Formulas contain a complete and balanced array of all the other vitamins and minerals your body needs for optimum health and maximum gains.

The core supplements on the Parrillo Nutrition program are vitamins and minerals, CapTri®, Hi-Protein Powder, and Pro-Carb. These are the most important ones for gaining lean mass. Liver-Amino Formulaô could probably fit into this group as well, but is not a major source of calories. Let’s talk about how to incorporate these into your diet.

CapTri® is a remarkable supplement and should be at the center of any bodybuilder’s supplement program, whether you’re trying to gain lean mass or lose body fat. Think of CapTri® as a source of pure energycalories. The special thing about it is that it’s used immediately by the body as a preferred source of energy and has almost no tendency to be stored as body fat. It’s a way (and probably the only way) you can greatly increase your caloric intake without risking getting fat. That is, of course, if the rest of your diet is good. CapTri® is absorbed by the body and burned for energy almost instantlyfaster, in fact, than glucose (1). Since it’s converted into energy so rapidly it has virtually no tendency to contribute to body fat stores. Here’s the deal: adding pounds of muscle mass to your body takes calories. You could supply the extra calories from regular foods, such as complex carbs and lean proteins. And this will work, but the problem is regular foods are more prone to be stored as fat than CapTri® is. So by increasing calories from regular food you can add muscle mass, but you’re more likely to put on fat at the same time. CapTri® itself is not converted to musclethat’s not what’s happening. How it works is CapTri® supplies the energy your body needs to function and the energy cost required to build more muscle. The protein foods that you eat supply the raw materials (amino acids) that are used to build new muscle. CapTri® spares the oxidation of amino acids, meaning that it blocks the use of proteins as fuel (2). This helps dietary protein be incorporated into muscle tissue more efficiently, as well as having an anti-catabolic effect to block muscle breakdown. The net result of increasing calories in this way is more muscle mass, without the increase in fat that comes from eating an excess of regular food. What happens if you eat too much CapTri®? The excess energy gets converted to body heat instead of being stored as fat. Also, excess calories from CapTri® can be lost as ketone bodies in the urine, something that doesn’t happen with regular food. Start by adding one-half tablespoon of CapTri® directly to your food at each meal. Every three days, increase your intake by another one-half tablespoon, until you’re gaining weight. Increasing the amount of CapTri® gradually helps avoid an upset stomach, which can occur because CapTri® is digested so rapidly. Usually between one and three tablespoons per meal works well for most athletes, although some use as much as five or six.

How can a supplement so rich in calories help you lose body fat? Simple. To use CapTri® while dieting replace some of your carbohydrate calories with an equivalent amount of calories from CapTri®. CapTri® contributes less to body fat stores than does carbohydrate, because it’s immediately converted to energy without being stored by the body (1,2). Metabolically speaking, this is called the thermogenic effect. Every time you eat, some of the food energy is converted to heat. The more energy that’s lost as heat, the less there is remaining to be stored as fat. Conventional fats found in regular food are not converted to heat much at all, and that’s why they contribute to body fat stores so much. About 3% of the calories in regular fat is lost as heat. About 15% of the energy from carbs is converted directly to heat, and about 20-30% of the energy in dietary protein is lost as heat. CapTri® has the most profound thermogenic effect of any food known, so it’s basically all burned for energy. You may be wondering, if this stuff is just converted into energy and lost as body heat, isn’t that a waste? Why not just eat less food? Two reasons. Eating less food will help you lose weight, but a significant proportion of it will be muscle mass. Also, decreasing calories slows down your metabolic rate, so you burn less calories, which means burning less body fat. The thermogenic (heat-producing) effect we just talked about actually works to increase your metabolic rate so you’ll burn fat faster. Plus, as mentioned above, it blocks protein breakdown so you won’t lose muscle while you’re losing fat. Of course, not all of the energy in CapTri® is lost as body heatmost of it is used to fuel activity and maintenance of the body. The point is, the energy from CapTri® is more prone to be used as body heat (energy) than are the calories from regular food, which is why CapTri® is less prone to be retained as body fat than regular food. Adding CapTri® to your diet increases the thermogenic effect of feeding (TEF), and if you’re producing more energy, you have a higher metabolic rate. And if you increase your metabolic rate, your body needs more energy, so it burns more body fat. By incorporating CapTri® into your diet, you’re reducing what is called the “food efficiency” of your diet, which is the proportion of dietary energy available for retention as body weight. The CapTri® diet helps you lose fat because more of your dietary calories are lost as heat, causing your body to draw on fat stores as fuel. Cutting calories also causes your body to draw on it’s fat stores for fuel, but this approach leads to muscle loss and slows down your metabolic rate, which slows down fat loss. CapTri® shifts your metabolism into a fat-burning mode without cutting calories and slowing your metabolism. Many bodybuilders go on CapTri® to lose body fat and are surprised to find they actually gain muscle at the same time. The last important reason why CapTri® helps you lose fat is that by substituting CapTri® for carbs you decrease insulin levels. Insulin is released in response to carbohydrate feeding and blocks the breakdown of body fat. With CapTri® you can decrease carbs to lower insulin levels and promote the use of body fat as fuel without sacrificing your energy level and lowering your metabolic rate. You can learn more about regulating the Glucagon-Insulin ratio by consulting the Parrillo Sports Nutrition Guide.

Parrillo Performance Products
(800) 344-3404

References
1. Bach AC and Babayan VK. Medium chain triglycerides: an update. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 36: 950-962, 1982.
2. Babayan, Medium chain triglycerides and structured lipids. Lipids 22: 417-420 (1987).

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Sports Nutrition Guide. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.