The Potential for Casein Protein in Overnight Recovery
06 Jan 2017 | FrieslandCampina DMV
Wires at the HIE in Frankfurt.
I'm here with Benno van Mersberche from Fries and Capena Ingredients, and the company is highlighting the potential for calcium protein in overnight recovery for elite athletes.
Benno, can you tell me a bit about some of the science behind this area and what's happening?
I can, thank you.
Basically what we find is that a lot of elite athletes already have a lot of protein in their diets.
And basically the most common thing they do is they take directly after training, they take a shake with whey protein, which is very effective of course for increasing muscle mass and recovering of their muscles.
There is one moment in the day that we found that basically everybody is lacking protein and it's quite obvious it's during the night because during the night we don't eat.
What was done was a clinical trial with athletes that have already a diet which is very high in protein.
Make sure that during their regular meals they get enough protein and that also after training they take their shake.
And half of this group was also given a cain shake just before bedtime, and what we found is that although all the group was very high in protein already in their diet, the group that had a casein shake just before bedtime even had more muscle mass after 12 weeks and also gained strength after 12 weeks.
Compared to the control group which also had a high in protein diet, what's the difference between the way in which whey and caffeine is kind of processed in the body?
That's rather different actually, because whey is a very fast protein, and that's also why it's being very popular in sports nutrition today, because you can imagine after training you want to recover and as soon as you ingest your shake, you want to have it go into the bloodstream very fast so it can reach your muscles very fast.
So you have good recovery.
Casein on the other side is a very slow protein.
It's up until 7 hours after ingesting, it's taken up into the bloodstream, and during the night that's exactly the behavior that you want because during the night nobody is going to wake up to eat again, to feed those muscles.
So if you ingest case just before bedtime, it lasts in your bloodstream has been measured for 7 hours.
And it's perfectly the whole night for most people, I think.
Most people sleep 67, or 8 hours, so the 7 hour digestion period is many athletes already taken this into their daily regimen, this notion of using calcium protein for overnight recovery.
We were quite shocked actually to observe that they don't.
We observed the dietary patterns of 420 elite athletes in the Netherlands, most of them training for the Olympics.
What you see is that their meals are actually being managed quite OK.
They have enough protein in their meals.
Also, after training, the custom of taking away shake is very adopted, but this whole evening opportunity is completely left untouched by most elite athletes.
So there's also a message that we are bringing out to them, but also a message that we want to bring out to the.
Amateur sport that wants to take in the protein most effectively that this evening opportunity is actually a very good and effective.
You have some concepts here that might be adopted by athletes.
Can you explain what you're presenting here?
What we are presenting today is a beverage concept having this slow digesting protein and for the rest of it it's very lean, so it means it doesn't have any additional carbs.
And it's very drinkable, so it's low viscous.
It has a very pleasant taste, and also the ingredient that we use here to make a beverage out of it is very heat stable, so you can make a stable beverage.
We can also make a shake proposition out of it.
We also have it on show and for the shake, of course, we make sure that you have a nice foam layer on top and that the protein is very soluble.
Thank you very much.
