Many athletes involved in all types of sports add protein powders to their daily regimen, assuming that it will help stimulate muscle mass as they train.
But does it?
You would assume many research studies are looking into this, and you would be correct.

I discuss an elaborate study that shows that provided the protein intake is adequate, exercise will help strengthen muscle somewhat, as well as improve the weight of bone mass. Additional protein does not work any better than adequate protein. Here is the link to the study.

I found an interesting article That refers to many studies on building muscle mass later in life. The article can be found here.

The national Institute of Health (NIH) recently put out a literature review of many randomized control studies on the subject of muscle mass with exercise in older individuals. That link can be found here.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to me on my website contact page, at healing outside the box.com.

That idea for this episode was sparked by an article in the Guardian about a woman who changed her yard into a suburban micro-farm. That article hit so many positive notes that I thought it was worthy of an entire episode.

But first, I did a quick review of the new documentary "Food Inc. 2". This is a sequel to the popular but controversial documentary "Food Inc", produced in 2008. Although they made excellent points in this sequel and it's an important topic for the front burner, I would have to put this one in the category of "more of the same". I recommend that you may be better off watching the first of this pair of documentaries, which is available on YouTube TV, Netflix, and other places.

This educational piece on micro-farming used a specific example of one woman's brave step into what will hopefully be the future of local farming. In 2014, the Obama Administration started the micro-farm program which joined forces with local farmers and wanna-be farmers to provide financial incentives for homeowners to grow their own food. At a time when folks are concerned about the rising price of supermarket food, this program provides an opportunity to have free food or nearly-free food grown in your neighborhood.

This program utilizes water recycling and overall water conservation, community access to organic soil, space-preserving technology, natural pest control, farm subsidies, and a path to cash for sharing your harvest. All this program needs now is a nudge from our leaders.

I often get questions from people who have seen advertisements for weight loss supplements and they wonder if they work. One of those supplement companies has a product that they call "GOLO". Their pitch is that it is a combination of supplement pills and a low-calorie diet, but it is primarily pills that contain a few minerals and some crushed herbs. I took a deep dive into the literature on the herbs they have included and I discuss the results in this episode.

Before I got to GOLO, I mentioned a wonderful organization called World Central Kitchen. They recently lost seven of their disaster relief workers in Gaza; tragically they made headlines for the worst possible reason. These people head towards the disaster while the rest of us are fleeing. They need our help more than ever now.

I first read an article in a lay magazine about the basics of the diet advice and herbal remedies they include. The link to the article can be found here.

I read an NIH article about the gardenia extract and I was surprised that there was some promise with this one. Here is the link to the NIH article.

This is an NIH article on the Banaba extract.

Another NIH article shows promising results from the salacious extract for both weight loss and blood sugar control.