Most people associate muscle with movement, and while this is a crucial aspect of its health and longevity benefits (which I will cover in another blog), perhaps one of the greatest benefits of healthy muscle is its tremendous metabolic benefits, which are independent of (in addition to) the strength benefits of muscle health.
Building muscle may not be something your regular doctor will tell you to focus on or how to achieve, but it is so key to living healthier for longer that at Agami we consider it a non-negotiable goal for healthy longevity.
In this post I explain why our muscles, as I truly believe (and much of the scientific data suggests), are key to enjoying a healthier life full of enjoyment and experiences to cherish.
What is muscle health?
From a functional point of view I would break down the term muscle health into three components that can impact our health:
1. Muscle mass
2. Muscle strength
3. Mobility
Mass and strength are by anlage closely linked (at the level most of us are living at, not so much if you are a competitive Olympic weightlifter or bodybuilder), however mobility can be considered somewhat independent of the other two components. In other words, you can have a lot of muscle mass and/or strength, but this does not naturally gift you with the same degree of mobility.
Your muscles are an organ, that carry a great deal of responsibility for keeping your metabolism healthy. This purpose is in fact so important that improving muscle health can have dramatic benefits to your overall health and function, lowering your risk of countless numbers of chronic diseases including diabetes, cardiovascular disease and stroke – some of the biggest killers as people get older.
The glucose problem
Glucose is a simple sugar – a carbohydrate – the amount of which you will see noted down on packs of food that you buy from the supermarket or otherwise. Most carbohydrates you eat are eventually broken down into glucose and absorbed into the blood stream. The rate of this absorption depends on the type of food the carbohydrate is contained in. Glucose levels in the blood needs to be maintained within a very tight range at all times through a process known as homeostasis. If this fails, you can become very unwell.
Thus, there are two opposing forces which effectively push our blood glucose levels in either directions. One is the burning and storage of glucose by our body for energy, the second is the input of glucose into our bloodstream.
The input side is made up of what we eat, but also the glucose that is produced by our liver from other molecules in our body like fats or proteins. The liver is key here to be able to buffer to a stable blood glucose level as clearly our food intake is not constant (we are usually not drip fed glucose straight into our bloodstream) and nor are we using glucose at the same rate all the time.
When we eat carbohydrates, they are broken down into glucose and absorbed into the blood stream. This causes a rise in blood glucose levels which in turn sends the signal to our pancreas to produce insulin, one of the master controllers of blood glucose levels.
The storage problem
Insulin causes glucose to move out of the blood stream into our cells and tissues, and it also tells the liver to reduce its own output of glucose. Insulin also has another major function, it promotes conversion of glucose into various forms of energy storage for future energy use. Now storage is a problem when you have limited storage capacity, as anyone with a computer full of family photos will understand. In the glucose case though, we have to dispose of the excess blood glucose somewhere at all cost to maintain a stable blood level.
The first glucose storage “drive” our body uses is the glycogen storage system. Muscles are our biggest sink for excess glucose as glycogen, in fact 70-80% of glucose disposal and storage in the above scenario occurs in the muscle1. Glucose is converted to glycogen which can be stored in tissues to later be broken down when we need more energy for example to run for a train.
Once this drive becomes full however, the body then has to convert glucose into something else that can be stored safely. This something else is fat, which is stored in various parts of your body, both the obvious places that we can see externally, but more importantly around our internal organs.
A downward spiral
So, we have achieved the critical requirement of maintaining a stable blood glucose concentration – great!
Although are bodies are capable of storing essentially unlimited amounts of fat, there is a fairly limited amount of fat that our bodies can store safely without some serious metabolic repercussions.
Now here is the punch line…
If you have too much energy stored as fat, various lipids (fats) can be overspill from the “safe storage” (although this is not very safe in reality) of dedicated fatty tissue into other cells. Lipids within muscle tissue renders the muscle more resistant to the effects of insulin. What this means then going forward is, the next time you eat carbohydrates raising your blood sugar, it will take a higher amount of insulin to move the same amount of glucose out of your blood and into the cells.
While your body can compensate and pump out more insulin for a long time, the higher levels of insulin lead to higher levels of fat storage, which then cause worsening insulin resistance, and so on and so on – you will notice we are now in a perpetual cycle.
This is the vicious downward spiral of insulin resistance, metabolic disease and all the myriad of serious health consequences it causes. If this continues, eventually compensatory mechanisms of increased insulin fail to meet demand, leading to the critical abnormality of uncontrolled high blood glucose levels – this is then called type 2 diabetes.
We’re gonna need a bigger sink
From the fairly simplified explanation of reality described above, we can deduce one important point. The higher our capacity to store glycogen, the less likely we are to need to store excess carbohydrates as fat, the less risk of insulin resistance developing, the better our metabolic health will be and the lower our risk of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease. In short, build muscle, build a bigger glucose sink!
It is therefore clearly of paramount importance to our health as a whole to build and maintain as much lean body muscle mass as we can to provide ourselves with as large a glucose sink as possible. Building muscle requires a combination of sufficient stimulus and adequate nutrients, particularly the right protein (amino acids), to build it.
I often hear the counter argument here that in order to build muscle, we arguably expose ourselves to risk – the risk of training and injury. However this risk can be so well minimised with the right movement coaching and training that it is negligible relative to the enormous benefits gained in both your physical and mental wellbeing.
Muscle-centric health at Agami
At Agami, my passion to instil in my patients is that building muscle is not just for the gym rats, those who want a beach body, to look good or even be able to lift heavy weights. Building muscle is about far more than serving an ego to be stronger or have a better physique – although the benefits of these are undoubtedly real.
Building muscle is vital to enjoy a healthy life, especially as we age and our muscle mass will otherwise naturally decline at least around 3% a year after the age of 30, and markedly greater above the age of 602. This is why we almost all of us should be focussing more on maximising muscle mass in our earlier years as much as possible – however it is also never too late!
We are able to give you targeted nutrition advice in combination with connecting you with the best trainers to support your journey to achieving your full muscle, and as a result, health potential.
Contact us to see how we can help you on your health journey. Look out for my upcoming post focussing on strength and mobility as key pillars of longevity!
References:
- Lee SH, Park SY, Choi CS. Insulin Resistance: From Mechanisms to Therapeutic Strategies. Diabetes Metab J. 2022 Jan;46(1):15-37. doi: 10.4093/dmj.2021.0280. Epub 2021 Dec 30. PMID: 34965646; PMCID: PMC8831809. Link
- Volpi E, Nazemi R, Fujita S. Muscle tissue changes with aging. Curr Opin Clin Nutr Metab Care. 2004 Jul;7(4):405-10. doi: 10.1097/01.mco.0000134362.76653.b2. PMID: 15192443; PMCID: PMC2804956. Link