Savvy Health, 10/2/19: Insulin for Protein Powder, Best Hydration, Tea & Plastics

You still need Insulin for Low-carb Protein Powder, as reported by Ginger Vieira for InsulinNation.com, 24 September 2019. A quickly digestible source of protein is important after a workout but that protein will impact your blood sugar more than you’d expect

Not all protein is created equal — and this is especially true when it comes to protein powders, whether it’s made from whey, egg whites, grains, veggies, collagen, or bone broth. There are three things that cause that protein powder to have a much bigger impact on your blood sugar than you’d expect.

- The protein in a protein powder is already broken-down, making it easy to absorb with little digestion
- Your body needs more than just amino acids after an intense workout
- Your body can’t necessarily make use of all that protein in one sitting

Many experts in the nutrition world believe that any protein quantity over 20 grams is converted into glucose because your muscles can only absorb and make use of so much protein in one sitting. At the end of the day, it’s simply important to realize that just because you’re not eating carbohydrates doesn’t mean you’re not feeding your body glucose. Your body’s favorite source of fuel is carbohydrates because that is the quickest, most efficient way to make what it needs to operate: glucose. If you aren’t giving it carbohydrates, it will find a way to get that glucose from other sources.

How many units of insulin do you need to cover your protein powder drink?There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this but there should be a consistent answer for your body if other variables around your protein powder are consistent, too. Take good notes, check your blood sugar often, and figure out what works for you!

Which drink is best for hydration? Hint: It isn’t water was published by Lisa Drayer for CNN Health, 25 September 2019.

Turns out, plain H20 isn’t the most hydrating beverage around, according to a study from Scotland’s St. Andrews University that compared the hydration responses of several different drinks. The researchers found that while water — both still and sparkling –does a pretty good job of quickly hydrating the body, beverages with a little bit of sugar, fat or protein do an even better job of keeping us hydrated for longer.

The reason has to do with how our bodies respond to beverages, according to Ronald Maughan, a professor at St. Andrews’ School of Medicine and the study’s author. One factor is the volume of a given drink: The more you drink, the faster the drink empties from your stomach and gets absorbed into the bloodstream, where it can dilute the body’s fluids and hydrate you.

But here’s where it gets tricky: Beverages with more concentrated sugars, such as fruit juices or colas, are not necessarily as hydrating as their lower-sugar cousins. They may spend a little more time in the stomach and empty more slowly compared to plain water, but once these beverages enter the small intestine their high concentration of sugars gets diluted during a physiological process called osmosis. This process in effect “pulls” water from the body into the small intestine to dilute the sugars these beverages contain. And technically, anything inside the intestine is outside your body.

And then, what do you do if you have T1? Just askin’! And why is Diet Coke more hydrating than water?

Tea now comes with a side of billions of microplastics per cup was reported by Melissa Locker for FastCompany.com, 26 September 2019. You may be swallowing billions of microplastics while sipping a cup of tea, according to a new study from McGill University. YIKES!

Microplastics are not normally a part of tea leaves or paper tea bags, but they may be introduced to the process when you try to be fancy and buy those premium teas that come in “silken,” occasionally pyramid-shaped tea bags. While those bags theoretically allow for larger tea leaves for better flavor, the bags are made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) or nylon, which can break down in hot water. That caught the attention of Nathalie Tufenkji, a professor of chemical engineering, who asked her graduate student, Laura Hernandez, to go buy a bunch of tea in silken bags, steep them in hot water, and test the results, according to the CBC.

While they were expecting to find some plastic particles in the tea, they found a lot more than that. “We were shocked when we saw billions of particles in a single cup of tea,” Tufenkji told the CBC.

Their results were published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, and they are eye-opening. One cup of a tea brewed from a single tea bag could contain 11.6 billion microplastic and 3.1 billion nanoplastic particles, the researchers estimated from their result. The results are so small—about the size of a grain of dust or pollen—that tea drinkers never notice them, but they are there, and there are many more microparticles of plastic in tea than there are in other types of food and drink. According to the researcher, that’s because the study included and counted smaller particles than most other studies, but also because when you throw a “silken” tea bag in hot water, “you’re literally adding plastic into the beverage.”