Ash Horton:
...(music) our host, the world renowned Christine Envall an IFBB professional, three times world champion, a mentor, an icon and of course, a founding co-owner of the best supplements money can buy, International Protein... (music)
Ash Horton:
In this podcast, we learn about glutamine. We discuss the boost and immunity you'll get from taking it and how Christine rates it in her top five supplements... (music)
Ash Horton:
Christine explain glutamine.
Christine Envall:
Okay. Where do I start? So glutamine is an amino acid, so it is one of the 20 amino acids that our body needs to run properly. It is not an essential amino acid, so what that means is that your body can actually make it from other amino acids within the body.
Ash Horton:
Okay.
Christine Envall:
Okay. However, it is what we call a conditionally essential amino acids. So what that means is under times of stress, if you've got an infection illness, recovering from surgery, recovering from some kind of injury or a wound or something like that, your body has a greater requirement for glutamine and your body generally can't keep up with producing it from the other amino acids that you take in, so therefore it becomes essential. Hence the term conditionally essential.
Ash Horton:
And it's good for gut health as well.
Christine Envall:
It is, it is good for gut health. It has a really, really key role in gut health and I'll explain that in a little bit more detail later on. But first of all, I guess we'll just talk about glutamine in the broader sense and what it actually is and that. So I'm introducing it, ta-ta-rah. So glutamine is an amino acid, in the body it is actually found in the muscle tissue, it makes up about 60% of the amino acid profile of the muscle tissue. So hence it is found in protein being an amino acid. So it's obviously in a high level in meat products, fish, chicken, it is in your plant proteins as well, but it isn't as higher concentration, I guess you could say as what it is in your flesh products. But we do consume glutamine throughout the day in food that we eat in general.
Christine Envall:
But as I said, the body normally has a higher requirement than what you're consuming if you're weight training, if your immune system is under pressure, if you're under stress, if you're just generally living. So that's where this whole thing of glutamine as a supplement to me, is it's one of the most essential supplements. But so to me, first my protein powder is my number one and then I'll always take glutamine because life isn't perfect and whether it be pollution that we come in contact with, whether it's stress at work, whether it is the weight training session or whatever it is that we're putting our body through. Therefore, I believe that we do need more than what we can consume out of food.
Ash Horton:
Okay.
Christine Envall:
Yeah. If someone's on a vegan diet or something like that, then they probably have even more reason to look at supplementing with a glutamine. Now, having just said that it's in higher concentrations in animal products, the glutamine that International Protein has is actually a plant derived glutamine, but that basically means that you took every piece of glutamine that they could out of the plant to make it, so it's coming from a plant source. So even though it naturally is in plant, it's not super high in glutamine only because the protein content of plant foods is generally lower, but you can actually extract that out and create glutamine from plants. So, that's where ours comes from.
Ash Horton:
So your glutamine product is a vegan product.
Christine Envall:
Yes, absolutely.
Ash Horton:
Okay.
Christine Envall:
Yeah. So glutamine, as you take it as a supplement, there's generally two forms; there's what we call a pharmaceutical grade, which is a totally synthetic form and with that it's basically a chemical reaction between different ingredients to produce glutamine. And it has things like methanol, which is quite toxic to the body left in it at a residue type level. So if someone's taking a pharmaceutical glutamine, they do actually need to cycle that, otherwise the methanol builds up in the body and can create toxicity. With the plant-based ones, which are like a fermented process, basically fermenting the plant material to extract the glutamine. They don't have those toxic residues left in them, so you don't need to worry about cycling or toxic buildup. And that's why they generally have a kind of a cleaner taste, glutamine can kind of have a slightly chemically metallic taste, if you're getting a pharmaceutical one, whereas it's a much cleaner taste if you're taking a plant one, but most of the time, you're adding it to other things, so you don't really pick up on that.
Ash Horton:
That's right, in the shakes, sort of thing?
Christine Envall:
Yeah. That's the beauty of glutamine, is it has a fairly neutral taste. So, I will add it to what I call my health shake, my magic health shake, which has a million ingredients in it, but glutamine is one of the five key ones that I always have in the morning. I have about five grams of it. Now, dosage wise, you can have anywhere kind of between, five grams to 45 grams a day without creating any problems to the body. They've done studies and the body's quite fine with that. So most people who are training and, they'll have somewhere between five and 20 grams of glutamine per day. So, that's introducing glutamine. What else can I say about glutamine? We talked about gut health and we talked about where glutamine fits.
Christine Envall:
So glutamine is actually an energy source for the intestinal wall and hence where it comes. So the gut lining and the intestinal wall. So that's where it has a really, really major role in gut health. So maintaining the integrity of our gut lining and also our intestines. So basically it stops the bad stuff from your intestine, getting into the rest of the body. So people might suffer from leaky gut or something like that and glutamine is quite essential to treating that and stopping that from even happening in the first place. So that's a very, very important thing to me, to make sure that everything's working properly digestive wise and gut health wise, it's also plays a critical role as an energy source for the immune cells. So immunity is the other thing where glutamine is so critical and essential. So it's feeding the gut lining, it's feeding your immune cells, but then also the linkage between gut health and the immune system is I guess, becoming more and more well-known.
Christine Envall:
So if you have a bad digestive tract or suffering from some gastrointestinal issues, your immune system is also compromised. So it's indirectly via that method, then also directly it's creating a fuel to help build the immune cells. So, more than anything, that's actually the role that glutamine plays. So I talked about how it was a conditionally essential amino acid, but that's really because it plays a role in helping to decrease infections, improve just general health and speed up recovery. So what that means is when your body's in that state of stress, it's using more and more of that glutamine. So if you're not giving it the glutamine, that your recovery is literally compromised in that way, because it's like the demand for it goes up, so you need to generally supplement at that point in time. What glutamine has been shown not to do, which is something that we all thought that it, I guess did do is whilst it's used a lot during your training, it is one of the amino acids, which gets broken down as a fuel source.
Christine Envall:
So your branch chains and your glutamine do get used while you're training. And even though the muscles made up of so much glutamine, studies haven't shown that it actually improves your recovery from a weight training session. So it doesn't really have a role in that. It's more, your branch chains, it's more your lucine, which has that role in catalysing the body to start to create new muscle tissue. So a lot of people who are taking it as a recovery supplement for training, but the research is really just coming out that, that doesn't have that role, it is really gut health and immune system, which is where I use glutamine for. And that's where all the research is showing and the direct relationship between the health of the gut and the health of the immune system. So that’s-
Ash Horton:
I was reading somewhere that it's used for water retention and muscles and that sort of sounded very creatine. It wasn't necessarily pulling that information off the [big 00:08:07] source, so.
Christine Envall:
Yeah. I haven't seen a lot about it's for water retention in muscle. I mean, obviously the muscle is about 80% water, but that's more linked to you obviously, like you said, your things like your creatine, your glycerol type molecules, your potassium, other things than what the glutamine is. But as I said, it does make up a large proportion of the muscle tissue, so that's maybe where people have kind of pulled that linkage. But no, they keep doing different studies instead of saying, okay, what's the impact on muscle growth, if a person's taking glutamine or not taking glutamine and there's not a difference to the placebo. But in terms of integrity of the gut and the gut health, and that's where there's a major focus. And as I said, that linkage between your gut health and immune system is paramount.
Christine Envall:
But where I see, obviously it fits into the weight training side of things is that weight training is stress, it's muscle growth and that, but it's a whole different thing, about every time you're going through a weight training session, heat session, cardio session, whatever it is, maybe you're dieting, maybe like... whatever it is that you're doing, it is a form of stress. So glutamine plays that role in the recovery from stress when you're breaking that muscle down. So it's an indirect way. So, like I said, it doesn't need to be taken at the time of the workout, it can be taken or is best taken, split doses throughout the day or like I said, the very least, just once a day, it doesn't matter if it's before you go to bed or when you wake up in the morning, because it's just, putting it into your system and you will be taking glutamine from other sources throughout the day, whether it be, plant proteins, whether it's animal proteins, there's that constant influx of glutamine.
Christine Envall:
So anywhere where there's a protein in a product, it's got to have some glutamine in there. And as I said, most of the proteins, again flesh proteins, because it makes up so much of muscle tissue, you'll be getting a good amount of glutamine, but that requirement is always higher, where you're doing literally anything or you're exposed to anything or you're eating bad food or alcohol in particular, anything that's really stressing the gut, the glutamine is going to be helping with that. So to me, I've used it ever since we launched International Protein's Glutamine back, like probably about 13 years ago, I can't exactly remember when we launched it. But as I said to me, protein powder is my number one supplement and then my next supplement is glutamine. Hence why we launched that product fairly early on in the days.
Christine Envall:
And I know myself, if I forget and I leave it at the F... no, don't take it home with me, I run out and I get lazy and skip it for about five days or something, I normally will feel myself start to come down with a cold or something like that. And then when I'm taking it, I will come in contact with people who have colds and [symptoms 00:10:51] and I very, very rarely get sick. So I definitely attribute a lot of that to the glutamine boosting up my immune system. And the other thing people will say, I have a cast iron stomach, because I have a very able to tolerate weird concoctions of foods and mixtures of foods and again, I believe that because I've kept a really good gut lining from having had that glutamine daily for 13 years now.
Christine Envall:
And that's what I said, that's why it comes into the basis of one of my, what I call my health shakes. People don't need to take it for muscle recovery as much as they really do need to look at it like it's an item which is going to help with their overall immune system. Which, if your immune system is strong, everything's good, everything's better, you are going to suffer from less colds. If you do get sick, you're going to get better quicker. If you do happen to injure yourself, you're going to recover from that better and particularly if people are having surgery, goodness, I'd be having about 20 grams a day of glutamine, if that was the case. Just a little note on why it is that when we have a glutamine product, we have to say, to only take 1.9 grams, when I'm talking about taking five, 10, 20 grams of glutamine, that's because food regulation in Australia says, that's all we're allowed to tell people to take.
Christine Envall:
There have been many, many studies done that show the safety of it. Up-to [inaudible 00:12:09] that 45 gram a day. I know people who said even 120 grams a day is okay, but to me, that's just ridiculous to take that much when you don't need that much, but that five to 20 grams a day is pretty good place to be with that.
Ash Horton:
Okay. Very, very interesting. Any final, last words?
Christine Envall:
As I said, if you haven't been using or you haven't tried it, I would definitely recommend people look at incorporating that into their routine and really just look and monitor, I guess, at how they're... if you normally get two, three colds a year, now it's probably a little bit strange at this time because of social distancing, we're really mindful of not getting those kinds of things, but just in a regular time, I guess try and monitor how you feel digestive wise and also just, your immune system and how frequently or less frequently you come down with colds and things.
Christine Envall:
Because I know it's a very marked difference. And I didn't realise how many years I had actually been using it for, but that's how long it's been on the market and I definitely noticed that I am a much healthier person for it.
Ash Horton:
Brilliant. Thank you very much, Christine.
Christine Envall:
Thanks Ash. You'll be getting your glutamine tea?
Ash Horton:
I will, I ordered it today.
Christine Envall:
Good.
Ash Horton:
Words of wisdom, if you like what you heard, recognise that these tips they're free. So show your support by becoming a loyal International Protein customer by jumping online, hunting our product down and hit that buy now button. So once again, like, share and subscribe to our podcast, so we can continue to bring you these episodes from our one and only Aussie muscle guru, three times world champion, Christine Envall... (music)
