Getting Older is the New Black

Clean, Efficient, Performance Nutrition 101:  Why WillPowders Scandinavian Protein Powder boosted with creatine and shilajit might just be your new best friend, without undue additional fuss and faff, as you aim for more years in health.

It’s one of those things: if someone offered you the chance to go back and pick up your youth, you might well bite their hand off, but probably only if you could take your hard-earned wisdom of the here and now with you.  But, alas, that sort of offer is the stuff of fairytales, anyway: a deal that can only be made in a magic land with a dodgy Rumpelstiltskin trickster who’s usually after your very soul.   Besides, all your teen idols (Air Supply, anyone?) are now rocking it with a more mature angle on life too, so it’s not all bad, surely?  And so, lots of us just get on with getting older as best we can, surprised that, by the age of 40, we’re creakier than we anticipated we might be and by 50 those things we assumed would go away with time are starting to hang around like a bad smell.  By the time you hit 60, maybe we finally realise that the habits we thought you could get away with when we were younger might well have something to do with what ends up happening to your body.  Time will tell …  

But, hang on a minute, what if there’s a way to preserve as much glory as we have now, whether we are in our 40s, 50s or 60s and beyond?  Even better, what if we could pimp that glory, somewhat?  Ok, so it might not be our youth-youth that we are reclaiming (see aforementioned caveat above to ease the pain of that fact), but there might well be a way to have more years in youthful-type health.  The bonus is that, while we might anticipate having to take a white knuckle ride of pain and perseverance to make necessary changes in making friends with our health, it could be a whole lot simpler, if we just learn to biohack. 

At WillPowders HQ, we talk about a triple: Nourish, Energise, Hydrate.  These are our basic set of keys with which to unlock the doors to a healthier, more vitalised way of living.  All else follows.  With these fundamentals in place, we are more likely to want to move - because that’s the natural human state, to want to move our bodies.  Movement leads to strength.  Once we are moving naturally and habitually, and most importantly, in our busy modern lives, keeping our health central to our being with simple but wholly effective everyday tools that are easy to integrate into existing routines, we find we ignite a strand of self-care purpose in our lives.  In turn, this can help our nervous systems to calm down, which means we are also helping in the process of ‘downshifting’ our lives.  (Nope, that’s not the same as downsizing to accommodate for emptier nests).  According to Dan Buettner’s work on Blue Zones, who studies populations of people across the world who have the longest lives, those with longevity don’t experience less stress but they do habitually spend some of their day shedding that stress consciously[*].  At WillPowders, we believe that our simple supplementation tools of nourishment, re-energising and hydration don’t add stress to your life, instead, they can help make life more manageable.   

Nourish

Add to your daily mix our Scandinavian Performance Protein Powder and you can boost your performance across the day, both physically and cognitively.  This bad boy is a bit of a chameleon.  While he might sound like he’s designed for elite athletes, don’t be fooled (although elite athletes would do well to add this to their daily routine, too, so do tell the sporting neighbours!).  This good-habit protein packs plenty of nutritional punch.   

Made with bone broth powder from Scandinavian cattle, it contains macronutrients vital to your, well, vital electrical currents.  These macronutrients are in electrolyte form, so more easily absorbed by your body.  Plus, our boosted protein powder easily lends your diet the whole amino acid profile.  Think of these soldiers as the building blocks of life.  They’ll stick together like your grandnephew’s stickle bricks and repair and replace where needed.  Plus, to stop the sugary-snackery jiggery-pokery that we are so often caught up in, and there’s little more ageing than sugar in most convenience snacks, we’ve added grass-fed butter and MCT powder.  These good fats help to make you feel satiated for longer.   The grass fed butter will offer vitamins A, D and K2 and, for gut health, butyrates which will feed the good bacteria in the bowel.  While, at the other end of the spectrum, ahem, so to speak, MCT powder, made from MCT oil, helps to feed the brain with ketones.  

Plus, if you are looking to ward off one of the symptoms of metabolic syndrome, and the dreaded Amplified Waistline of Ageing seems to have taken up residence around your middle (35 inches for women and 40 inches for men), and you’ve also got a sharp eye on the other devil of a cluster of conditions, like increased weight, known to herald in diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease, then MCT oil helps to increase energy expenditure and can be beneficial to those aiming to control weight.   If you want to amplify the benefits of MCT oil in your diet beyond our protein powders, WillPowders MCT Oil can be taken on its own or added to recipes such as whizzing up a WillPowders pesto or salad dressing.  

Creatine is created naturally in the body in the liver and kidneys.  We can get creatine if we eat meat in our diet.  However, most often, when we are active, there is not quite the supply we need residing in our skeletal muscles.  One of the benefits of creatine is that, if we supplement with creatine powder, it can reduce fatigue in muscles when they work hard.  This is why it helps with the building and maintenance of that all important muscle mass.   However, its lesser known qualities also help cognitive function, and, as such, it is of interest to scientists in preventing cognitive degeneration in ageing.  Shilajit is also of interest for this.  The humectants of fulvic and humic acid could play crucial roles in the way we look after our cognitive health.  While those youngsters might be using creatine and shilajit to sharpen athletic physical and mental athletic performance, we might be employing the benefits of creatine for a whole range of other reasons on top, like getting through a fast-paced work day or going from Couch to 5K or trying to maintain and repair muscle mass so it’s not lost over time as we get older.  And we certainly don’t preclude the idea that you might be demonstrating your sporting prowess, too!

It’s sad but true that, as we age, we are more likely to suffer from long standing conditions with our health.  This can begin as early as our sixteenth year.  Conditions that affect the musculoskeletal system are the most common long standing condition.  This is one of the reasons that we focus on strength which comes from movement here at WillPowders.  As we age, we risk sarcopenia which decreases our muscle mass, and compromises the strength and functionality of our muscles.   Then we are ushering in a whole range of morbid problems.  Creatine supplementation might benefit a range of conditions including sarcopenia and also ‘several diseases characterised by atrophic conditions, weakness, and metabolic disturbances (i.e., in the muscle, bone, lung, and brain) [...] there has been evidence indicating that creatine supplementation is capable of attenuating the degenerative state in some muscle disorders (i.e., Duchenne and inflammatory myopathies), central nervous diseases (i.e., Parkinson's, Huntington's, and Alzheimer's), and bone and metabolic disturbances (i.e., osteoporosis and type II diabetes)’ [*].   This is one of the main reasons why we pimped our more familiar protein powders.  However, there is a caveat here:  you need to couple creatine supplementation with exercise, particularly resistance training.  Lifting a cup of tea to your lips doesn’t really count (although keep reading to see how you can fortify your regular cuppa to further re-gain or maintain muscle mass).  Yep, we’re gutted about that, too!  The good news is that, when you do engage in resistance training, the creatine supplementation will help build more muscle mass than if you didn’t take creatine [*].  Add to this that supplementing with our award winning hydrolysed bovine collagen peptides (stir it into your familiar brews) could also support an increase in muscle mass, ‘the combination of resistance exercise and collagen peptide supplementation resulted in a significant improvement in muscular strength as well as a significant increase in muscle mass’ [*]  and you’ll really be layering in ways you could be looking after your long term mobility.  

Tau proteins are mainly found in the brain.  Tau proteins are susceptible to environmental changes and can become ‘tangled’, leading to cell damage and inflammation.   It is possible to see disruptions in tau proteins decades before the onset of a neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimers [*].  It seems that fulvic acid can help ease those ‘tangles’ as part of the body’s natural ways of, if you like, taking out the ‘trash’ [*].  Alongside this, other studies have supported that administration of fulvic acid ‘resulted in managing dementia symptoms, better appetite, sleeping, and higher performance’ [*].   Scientists don’t know whether fulvic acid is the magic bullet for neurodegenerative diseases, more research is required, but evidence is growing that fulvic acid may play a role in brain health.  If we couple fulvic acid’s potential as a nootropic with the properties of MCT oil, as we have in our performance protein, then we could potentially be looking after our cognitive health for the longer term.