Smooth muscles with a smoothie

Hello you,

Since I have bought a blender, I am a smoothie addict. Smoothies exist in all different flavors, there are healthy ones, less healthy ones, blue ones, red ones, and even green ones. Really, you can mix everything into a smoothie.  I am not saying it will taste that great, though. 

My new favorite smoothie is a coffee smoothie. Yes, it may sound strange, but it tastes amazing. You probably have to like the coffee taste, for liking the smoothie. (just a small detail) I actually kind of ‘stole’ the recipe from the American Runners World website, and changed some ingredients. This smoothie is a perfect recovery smoothie after a running work-out or race. You want to know it? Here we go! 

Me and my muscles love the following smoothie :)

The ingredients are as follows – of course you can vary with the amount of coffee or milk you want to use.

100 mL chilled coffee
100 mL soy milk (if you’d prefer,  you can also use ordinary milk)
One banana
Two teaspoons natural cacao powder (not a processed one)
About 2 or 3 ice cubes 

What’s the reason for this smoothie to improve your recovery? As I said in one of my earlier blogs, coffee (especially the compound caffeine) can help store your glycogen faster. Especially the combination of glycogen and carbohydrates will help your body restock muscle glycogen stores faster, than carbohydrates alone. 

I used soy milk for this smoothie, instead of regular milk, because it is proven that soy consumption can reduce your LDL (low-density-lipoprotein) cholesterol, also seen as the ‘bad cholesterol’.  Also, soy milk contains less saturated fat compared with cow milk, of course it depends if you choose non-fat or low-fat milk. Soy milk is often enriched with calcium and vitamin D. Vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin, it is unique because our body can synthesize vitamin D₃ from sun exposure. Vitamin D is important for athletes, because it promotes calcium absorption in the intestine, this is important to maintain the skeletal calcium balance. Weak bones can eventually lead to severe injuries, so it’s important to have an adequate calcium and vitamin D intake. 

Bananas are a good source of carbohydrates, which your body  needs as a fuel to recover from the work-out. Also, bananas are rich in potassium, this electrolyte helps to maintain the fluid balance. Inadequate fluid intake is negative for your performance. It is important to maintain the fluid balance, to maintain a normal body temperature and a normal blood volume. Thanks to the banana and its potassium, your recovery will improve.

Natural cacao powder gives the chocolaty tastes, without adding lots of empty calories. More important, cacao provides antioxidants, which can attack the free radicals in your body. During exercise, you need more oxygen, which leads to an increase in the production of oxidants. Those oxidants contribute to muscular fatigue, it’s an inflammatory response (muscle soreness). As a response, your body starts producing free radicals to remove the damaged tissue. Free radicals can cause damage to your cells, and antioxidants are able to inhibit those oxidation reactions. So, adding cacao to your smoothie provides anti-inflammatory antioxidants, which is  positive for your recovery.

Chosing the right nutrients can make a big difference for your recovery process after a work-out or race. I am not saying this smoothie is the best way to improve your recovery, by eating a banana alone you are doing a good job as well. Just keep in mind your recovery depends on what you eat afterwards. Your body will restock muscle glycogen the best if you eat within an hour or so after a work-out. 

My message for today: eat (or drink in case of this smoothie) something nutrient rich to optimize your recovery! 

Thanks for reading.

Love, Marlou

Limit your liquorice love

Hi everyone, 

It has been a while since the last time I wrote on blogspot.com. Due to holidays and other stuff I almost forgot I had made this food blog. Therefore, time for an update! The universities have started again, which means I get loads of interesting and uninteresting information from the professors. Of course, I won't bore you with the uninteresting parts.

The courses I take this period are Epidemiology & Public Health, General Toxicology and Integrative Human Physiology. The last subject is my favorite of those three. That is also the one which reminded me of my blog. It popped up in my mind right away, when I heard this information about liquorice, so here we go!

First some general information about liquorice. Holland is known for its crazy liquorice (= "drop") consumers - aside from other typical Dutch things - together the Dutch population eats 30.000.000 kg a year, which is about 2 kg liquorice a year a person. Liquorice is made from liquorice extract. The sweet taste of liquorice is caused by the compound glycyrrhizin, which is about 50 times sweeter than sucrose. Especially in the past, people used to chew on those liquorice roots (which look like a plain wooden stick). Nowadays, you can still buy it in some Dutch stores, although people prefer eating candies liquorice, sweet or very salty, to chewing on a stick.

Liquorice stick

 Today, during a lecture from Integrative Human Physiology about stress, the professor told us something about liquorice. In what way is liquorice related to stress? And in what way is hypertension (high blood pressure) related to eating liquorice? Probably none of you knows the correct answer, so let me help you. First some information about stress, our body has two neuron endocrine systems which work together to regulate stress. We have our sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal gland (also known as HPA), the first one produces epinephrine and nor-epinephrine, HPA produces cortisol. Cortisol is a glucocorticoid (steroid hormone), with a permissive role (gluconeogenese - releasing energy) and on the other hand a suppressive role (prevention of overshoot stress). Okay, enough of those physiological terms, back to the liquorice.

As I wrote before, there is the compound glycyrrhizin present in liquorice, due to this compound you can develop hypertension. One addition: you have to eat a crazy high amount of liquorice to develop hypertension. What is the reason for hypertension and eating liquorice? Well, let me explain. There is a enzyme present in our body 11-β-HSD which can convert the active cortisol (one of the stress hormones) to the inactive cortisone.  The compound glycyrrhizin will decrease the conversion of cortisol into cortison, this results in a higher blood pressure. Just because one tiny enzyme, you can raise your bloodpressure by eating liquorice. Our body is so fascinating! 

This was the fun fact about liquorice, I hope it was worth reading it. Remember the message: "limit your  liquorice love" - don't eat kg's a day, if you'd like to have a healthy blood pressure.

Writing about it makes me want to eat liquorice... Considering I do not have a high blood pressure and I am not planning on eating loads of liquorice, I say -  let's do some grocery shopping and buy some delicious liquorice!

Next time when I hear something interesting during one of my lectures, I will post it right away! 

Thanks for reading. Love, Marlou.