Hack Your Hormones
Bone Broth Protein Powders: For Pushing It Real Good
In a world seemingly swimming in the benefits of bone broth, you might wonder how and why on earth it transformed to powder and found its way into protein powders. Surely that is the domain of whey powder?
The shelves are full of protein. Once upon a time our choice was the meat or cheese counter that provided us with protein, not forgetting the odd yoghurt and pint of full fat milk. These days, stop to fill up the tank of your car and chances are that, when you pay, you’ll find yourself standing in line staring at a range of protein bars flavoured for a child’s birthday bash. You know protein is necessary in your diet and you know you’re trying to avoid snacking so it’s tempting to reach for a bar as a halfway house. Doesn’t protein make you feel fuller somehow?
Of course, these bars are full of sugar so, alas, you aren’t stepping so far away from a full blown bar of chocolate.
Or maybe you already have several dusty packets of whey powder lurking in the back of your cupboard from when you or someone in the tribe had that last gym kick. Oddly, each of them seem to have an image of a deconstructed dessert on them or the packets look strangely technical, as though they should be kept on the shelf with the motor oil. Then there’s the huge plastic tubs of protein powder, the ones that make you feel like you’ve shrunk or they’ve grown to ridiculous anabolic proportions, that you’ve furtively eyed up but aren’t really sure what they do or how they work. Maybe you’ve sampled the contents through what felt like considered choice and hoped for the best like Neo choosing the blue or the red pill. That’s right, when it comes to protein and protein powders, you may have learned the whole shebang can be a bit of a minefield. And now you hear that there’s bone broth powder in there as well. What is the world coming to?
WillPowders Bone Broth Protein Powders: Function and Form
At WillPowders we like function and form. One without the other is just plain disappointing and more than likely a waste of money, to be quite frank. Every ingredient earns its place on the podium if we include it in our protein powders. Let’s start with bone broth powder. We consciously chose bovine bone broth. Here’s why:
- The bovine broth powder we use is made from the bones of grass-fed Scandinavian cattle
- Since they eat grass, there is no need to worry that their bones have sequestered nasties from feeds that other cattle can be fed, vegetable oils, for example
- Our bovine bone broth powder has a complete amino acid profile.
- It packs a nutritious protein punch that is completely odourless and tasteless, something that can’t be said for other types of bone broth powders
- It isn’t a carbohydrate so, if you are following a ketone diet, you’re all good here
- It has electrolyte minerals which means the body absorbs them readily
- The bone broth powder form dissolves completely in liquid so no gritty, grainy textures
- As a protein, it helps you to feel fuller for longer as it satiates
Just a side note here, if you are still opting for whey protein, consider what that cow has been given as feed. Many herds are fed on soya products and vegetable fats that are not good for them. This affects the nutritional quality of their milk and therefore the whey that is derived from it.
An -ose by any other name is still a sugar
Human babies are drawn to sweet tastes. If you’ve ever tried to wrestle a fromage frais from a toddler you’ll be familiar with how highly they prize sweet flavours. Because our liking for sweetness is so hard wired into us for our very survival when we are young, many of us can find ourselves carrying that sweet tooth into adulthood. However, because we also tend to associate liking sweet things with being a child, and because we know that sugar does our bodies no good long term, many companies like to disguise the sugars in their protein products in order to smuggle them past your lips. Unfortunately, the food industry has got uncannily good at calling a spade a chandelier, or any one of about 50 names for sugar in our foods. Alongside naming a vegetable, for example, corn, to make us believe that we are getting one of our five a day, they will then slip in the word syrup, presumably hoping you are ignorant of the fact that corn syrup is, that’s right, the tooth-achingly sweet stuff you drizzled on your pancakes on Pancake Day. Oh, how we cast spells with words …
Here’s a rule: anything that ends with -ose is a sugar.
Watch out for the following sugars masquerading as something else:
- Fructose - fruit, honey and some vegetables have this type of sugars - natural, but still a sugar - it is broken down by the liver
- Glucose - is present in carbohydrate food
- Galactose - no, not the chosen sugar of the Galactic Federation (unfortunately), instead, this rascal is the reason why your peas taste sweet
- Sucrose - ah, the dynamic duo of glucose and fructose shaking hands
- Dextrose - this bad boy comes from corn or wheat
- Maltose - grains break down into this sugar so while the wheat shreds or flakes of corn might look like they’ve never seen a sugar, remember they will become a type of sugar once they hit your digestive tract
Sugar occurs naturally, right, so what’s the problem?
Well, cherry stones are natural too but they contain amygdalin which your body will convert to cyanide. Do you get our drift? In human history, we have always been curious about refining natural ingredients down to mine certain properties from them but that doesn’t mean those prized properties are something our bodies can handle in large amounts. If you accidentally ate one or two cherry stones, you’d be fine. If you ate a whole raft of them, you would be in danger. And so, we aren’t in any rush to eat huge amounts of cherry stones. However, a food industry that refines sugars and puts them in practically everything we consume can still go under our radar in terms of the damage that this can do. The constant presence of high amounts of glucose in our blood torrent can cause insulin resistance which you can read more about in our Sugar and Spikes and All Things Insulin Resistance blog. Ultimately, an excess of blood sugars can damage small capillaries in our vascular system, and none of us wish to usher in a stroke, as well as lead to Type 2 Diabetes.
Sugar Me Silly
If you find that your current bone broth protein powder lists a sugar, even something that sounds as harmless as coconut sugar, then that manufacturing company is not doing you any favours. Coconut sugar might be slightly lower on the glycemic index (GI) at half the score of cane sugar but it still contains fructose (the sweetest of all the sugars), glucose and sucrose and has the same amount of calories and carbohydrates as cane sugar. It’s definitely not a ketone feast!
Sugars can also wreak havoc with your gut.
If you don’t have your gut health, your immune system is affected as the gut is a natural barrier to the external world. At its optimum, the gut will help transition all the things we need from the outside world into our bloodstream - like those essential amino acids from a bone broth powder. Unfortunately, conditions such as candida and leaky gut, which are exacerbated by our sugar intake, mean that our gut is also likely to absorb things that our bodies treat as foreign objects (because they are) like food particles. This leads to a cycle whereby our body begins to trigger immune responses to the existence of those food particles in places our body can’t cope with. Our bodies end up attacking themselves in this immune response and this can lead to autoimmune disease. So, sorry, coconuts, while we love your fats, which you can check out the benefits of here Why MCT Oil Should Be Part of Your Diet, we don’t welcome your sugars in our protein powders. At WillPowders, we are nothing if not super selective on your behalf - a little like the security at the door of an exclusive boutique club - so that you know all of our ingredients are body friendly.
The good news is that, knowing all this, we chose to sweeten our protein powders with stevia.
Stevia can help gut health and avoid spiking insulin levels. It might even promote the growth of beneficial bacteria in your gut. Happy days, indeed! To find out more about why we choose stevia as an addition to our protein powders, side step into our blog The Sweet Truth - Is Stevia All It's Cracked Up to Be?
Pin it on the grid (that’ll be your fascia)
We know that muscle is a protein and that is why we can choose to lean into eating meat and supplementing our diets with a protein powder. But did you know that muscles slot into the fascia? That’s right - they don’t exist on their own, kept in place by where they meet the tendons and bones. The fascia provides a framework, like a net bag, on which and in which our muscles grow and repair. There are three essential amino acids that will repair muscles: leucine, valine, and isoleucine. If you are looking to improve muscle mass, say through resistance training, then WillPowders Protein Powders include these three essential amino acids in the powdered bone broth. So, that is good news.
Remember ...
Those muscles slot into their respective bags in the fascia, the sinew membrane that runs throughout our bodies. Bone broth powder also supports the fascia since it contains collagen. The fascia is made primarily of collagen. While many of us desire increased muscle mass for the shape and strength it gives us, alongside the energy burn these muscles give us, even at rest, it’s worth understanding that to have a fascia that is able to repair in order for the muscles to build on and be contained in, we also need collagen. While bone broth does contain collagen, it is not as bioavailable as hydrolysed collagen peptides. This is why we also extol the virtues of hydrolysed bovine collagen peptides alongside the collagen that bone broth powder offers. Our collagen peptides are from the hides of Swiss grass-fed cattle, available here and can be added to hot and cold drinks and cooking, as they are thermally stable at high temperatures. Your taste buds will never know they’re there, but your body and fascia will and it will have the fullest range of amino acids to choose from in its repair processes.
Foods, Feels and Flavours from Nature
Our protein powders come in a range of flavours, of course, but, equally, one of the things we want in a satisfying protein powder is the ‘mouth feel’. When a food feels pleasantly smooth and creamy in our mouth, we experience satisfaction. Thanks to two out of the handful of clean ingredients in our protein powders, we can offer the sensory pleasure of eating or drinking the protein (it depends if it's a protein pancake or a soothing and creamy hot chocolate that you’ve rustled up). But that’s not all. Grass-fed butter adds this sensory delight PLUS the butyrates in the butter help your gut to function well. Grass-fed butter contains nutrients such as vitamin A and beta carotene as well as vitamin K2 which helps regulate the calcium in blood. It also contains omega 3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), which can boost the immune system and fight disease.
Of course, most people love chocolate in some form or another. Unfortunately, it’s often to be found cut with sugar which means the cocoa loses some of the potential health points scored. Not with WillPowders as we use stevia for its natural sweetness and its ability to swerve an insulin spike. WillPowders chocolate protein powder delivers cocoa that can just get on with the job of lending its phytonutrients to us for their antioxidant properties for your body. It’s also in possession of flavonoids which have the potential to look after your heart health.
Acing Amino Acids
Whey, hey? Well, it’s what protein powders have ‘traditionally’ been made from, and yet, its provenance is not as lengthy as bone broth. Bone broth has sustained humankind for thousands and thousands of years. If you want to ace amino acids then you need our bone broth protein powder. With a complete amino acid profile, you don’t have to worry that you are a Half-A-Job-Harry. No more combing labels to see what’s what with what’s in and what’s out cross-referencing to what E numbers set the kids off on one. It’s clean, nutritious, delicious and easy. After all, haven’t you got other things to be doing? You can push your weights and push essential nutrients on the family, practically at the same time!
Mix.
Drink.
Done.
Recipes
Protein Rich, Homemade Chocolate Spread
A chocolate spread you'll want your kids to eat off a spoon. Rich in protein and highly nutritious, you'll no longer have to police the chocolate pot.
Chocolate Protein Balls
If you haven't tried the WillPowder’s Bone Broth Protein Powder yet, get on it. It’s so tasty and is made using bone broth protein, as opposed to whey or Soy...