Sunday, October 17, 2010

What We Eat and How We Feel

I remember when the Internet first started, people were speculating that things like trade shows would go away completely.  Who needs to be in one place physically when you could do it virtually?  I do think that the role of trade shows is different these days, but I learn things there that I would never have known otherwise.  Here’s a smattering of what I learned at the Natural Products Expo this week.

Teraswhey is going to be featured in an upcoming book written by a psychiatrist who is using nutrition as part of how he treats his mentally ill patients.  When you think about it, that he anticipates that his book will be controversial in the psychiatric community says a lot about the dysfunction of our medical system.  Imagine someone who is bipolar who doesn’t work on regulating his or her blood sugar, for example.  He likes our whey specifically because it has the clean functionality he is looking for.  He uses it in a protein diet he recommends as part of a treatment regimen for treating depression.

An epidemiologist working with an HIV positive patient population told me that the side effects of the drugs and secondary illnesses experienced by his patients cause their absorption of protein to be severely limited.  It may take a patient consuming 120g of protein a day for their bodies to absorb half of that.  Since they are also likely to have stomach problems, the only way they can get enough protein is by supplementing with highly bio-available whey protein.  He likes teraswhey for his population because we have a range of flavors and our products aren’t chalky and taste great.

This is the year of the gluten-free cracker.  Lots of new brands and products were there.  I think it’s interesting that so many people are finding that they can’t digest gluten these days.  I also think it is interesting that people ask me whether my whey is gluten free.  I suppose its possible that people might add wheat gluten to a whey protein powder, but this is really more an issue that people have no idea where whey comes from.  I gather the average consumer doesn’t know that hamburger doesn’t come from anything other than a supermarket either so maybe this isn’t so odd.

All of this makes it clear to me that even the scientific world is starting to embrace the notion that what we eat really does impact how we feel.  That is a huge step forward.


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