How about some chocolate milk after exercise?
September 3rd 2010 09:42
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Remember - exercise is good for the brain and memory
A new study suggests that drinking a glass of chocolate milk after strenuous exercise may do as much as an expensive sports drink to help your body get back to its former levels, and is greatly superior to a carbohydrate-only drink.
William Lunn, a newly hired assistant professor of exercise science at Southern Connecticut State University, wrote his doctoral dissertation at the University of Connecticut on the effects of chocolate milk during recovery from endurance exercise, such as running.
“What grabs everybody about this study,” he says with a smile, “is that we used chocolate milk, a food that’s available for everybody. You can just pick it up off the refrigerator shelves anywhere. And just about everybody likes it.”
Participants — all of whom were college-age males who were moderately trained runners — took a 45-minute run on the treadmill at a medium pace. They then had a drink of either fat-free chocolate milk or the same volume of a carbohydrate-only beverage made from concentrated KoolAid. Both beverages had the same amount of calories.
For the next three hours, the recovery period, Lunn and the researchers did blood draws and muscle biopsies of the leg muscles, looking to see how well the muscle protein in the leg was resynthesized, and how quickly glycogen was being replenished.
Your body stores carbohydrates in the muscles as glycogen — and so naturally the carbohydrate-only drink does a great job of replenishing that, he says.
“What we found in the study is that between the chocolate milk and the carb-only drink, the glycogen levels were similar,” says Lunn. “Chocolate milk replenished the glycogen just as well.”
But because the chocolate milk contains protein, something that the carb-only drink did not, Lunn says researchers were excited to see that there was a significant increase in the repair of the muscles in the men who drank the chocolate milk instead.
“Your muscle protein is made of amino acids,” Lunn says, “and because milk provides these amino acids, it’s incorporated into the body’s muscles. No one had shown this before in the context of recovery from endurance exercise. Most of the previous researchers had simply looked at whether milk or chocolate milk could replenish the glycogen.”
Lunn, who has been studying muscle metabolism, says that our muscles are constantly in a state of breaking down and building up proteins. “When you’re exercising, the muscles are being broken down more quickly than when you’re at rest. So unless you provide food to provide outside amino acids, your levels won’t be able to get back to where they were,” he explains.
There was another part of the study, too, a performance evaluation. After the initial run followed by a drink, the men were put back on the treadmill and given a very intense run — steeper and faster. They were told to run for as long as they could take it.
“The runners who had drunk the chocolate milk lasted significantly longer than the others,” Lunn says.
The study was funded by the National Dairy Council, but Lunn explains that the study didn’t mean that milk and only milk would serve the purpose of replenishing the nutrients.
“People who are lactose intolerant or who just don’t like milk can still benefit from the findings of this study,” he says. “What we’re really saying is that you need carbohydrates and proteins in order to recover. You can find those in other food sources, too.”
For best results, he adds, people need to drink the beverages between 30 and 60 minutes after exercise.
More studies are needed, he says, to see if these same results would apply to women.
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