Visit the Microscopic Colitis Foundation Website
A lot of what he's talking about in this article is a teasing take-down of the kind of 'broscience' weight-lifting guys apparently share in the gym... not exactly required reading for most of us
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/how-many ... more-22548
His point is that having a ton of muscle so you can "burn fat" while lying around on the sofa is - not the point. In addition to improved insulin sensitivity, here's the good news about muscle that caught my eye:
The pdf link is here: http://www.ajcn.org/content/84/3/475.full.pdf+html - there are a couple of other links within his article as well - one specifically about the connection between organ reserve in aging and muscle mass, and the badness of inflammation in that regard...Having greater muscle mass also acts as metabolic reserve in times of trauma. I’m not talking about famine or starvation. I’m talking about car accidents, internal damage to organs, severe burns, cancer, sepsis, and catastrophic injury. A great review article (PDF) from five years ago summarizes the role skeletal muscle plays in recovery from and survival of trauma. In these unfortunate but very real instances, protein requirements shoot up to repair damage, and muscle protein breakdown increases. More muscle mass means you have more reserves to keep the amino acids flowing. When healing from burns, dietary protein needs increase to 3 grams per kg of bodyweight. If you can’t stomach that much or dietary protein isn’t available to you, it comes from existing muscle. And, if you don’t have much muscle to spare, you’re going to recover more slowly from severe burns. Same goes for cancer patients; those who have the greatest muscle mass tend to suffer fewer recurrences and live longer. Think of skeletal muscle mass as a buffer for hard times.
My point in bringing this to this forum is - WOW, MC sure can be the kind of health crisis that might take higher protein intake than normal to weather. And of course, during a real digestive crisis, both consuming and utilizing dietary protein are no doubt sub-par. I wonder whether someone more muscular would have weathered my March gluten-crash any better, but it's an interesting thing to ask. Anyway... I can feel a lot of random speculating starting right about now (is this why women more frequently than men are MC-stricken? why it traditionally showed up in middle age, at a point when muscle mass often declines? is the general pudgification of American contributing to the seeming huge increase in celiac/non-celiac gluten sensitivity, specifically because of the reduction of muscle that's implied?).
I'll be interested in whether this correlates with anyone else's experience. My calf muscles in particular seem to have recovered, though I don't have any objective measures on that. (I noticed change even 3-4 months later, during our vacation - they were still bulking back up during that week of tourist-y walking.)
--Sara
