Growth hormone and diet

[Haakon_Myrseth]

Studying physiology and biochemistry last year in my medical school I was puzzled when I read about growth hormone in my endocrinology chapter. What stimulated it's secretion was actually low insulin levels, hypoglycemia, ghrelin ( secreted during starvation) makes it obvisously a starvation hormone. Physyology is one of the most interesting subjects I have studied and usually when it all comes down to it, the way our bodies work makes sense, but what I don't understand is that how come such a superanabolic hormone is secreted during starvation?? As we all know it has changed the bodybuilding scene since it came on the market in the 80s enabling one to build muscle and burn fat simultaneously.
Last christmas I cam over a very interesting book called the anabolic diet, basically what it does is manipulate the levels of growth hormone by a ketogenic diet consisting of fat and proteins and only 30 g of carbohydrates during the weekdays and a carbloading phase during the weekend. I noticed very good gains in my strength training, and especially in my isometric stretching. And the only reason for this I believe is the increased levels of growth hormones as I also lost a lot of fat in the beginning of this diet. So by basically getting into ketosis, and eating little carbohydrates, you become hypoglycemic, and stimulate the secretion, and during the weekend when you radically change to a high carb intake, will induce a stress reaction, also causing a high secretion. However, eating a meal more than 500 calories, will cause a high insulin secretion, even if the carbohydrate content in the meal is low accorindg to science of sports training, which will downstimulate gh secretion. This makes me question how effective this diet is considering the fact when you're trying to gain weight a meal can easily exceed 1000 calories.
Then on the other hand is the other way of stimulating it's secretion, by simply fasting for a certain amount of time, such as the warrior diet. I've also read about a swedish nutrionist and personal trainer who has this plan: fast for 16 hours, your workouts are also done during this time as this would increase the gh stimulation. After your workout you have a 8 hour eating window, usually 2 or 3 meals within this time. You can read more about this on www.leangains.com
One more thing I'de like to point out is that I have secreal friends who are serous in strength training. One of the things I've noticed is that those who seem to gain the best muscle quickly and 'genetically gifted' is also the ones who have had a strong and large bone structure, especially larger and wider hands and fingers, not of the size of a patient with acromegaly, but very bigger than the average, which makes me think that perhaps ones production of gh is one fo the biggest reasons between socalled easygainers and hardgainers.

I've read through the nutrition chapter in science of sports training, but I'm suprised to see that there's not much about how to eat in order to manipulate the secretion of this hormone as it would be truly beneficial especially for stength athletes. I would have thought the russians would have done a lot of research on subjects such as this, usually what we found out in the west has already been discovered in the old soviet union long time ago.

I don't know, maybe I'm making a big deal out of nothing, but I've been thinking about this for a long time now. I'm gonna go and talk with my biochemistry teacher about this some day as well.

[Thomas Kurz]

Hi Haakon,

I think you will find these two posts interesting:

http://skylertanner.com/2009/11/08/the- ... mone-post/

http://extremehumanperformance.com/blog ... -exercise/

Best regards,