Sports nutrition food refers to a class of food that can provide special nutritional requirements for the sports body, adjust the metabolic state and help improve physical performance and fitness.

With the vigorous development of competitive sports and national fitness movement, the use of sports nutrition food supplementation to ensure health and achieve the best fitness effect for both athletes and the fitness public has become an urgent problem, and has received more and more people’s attention. What food ingredients can be applied in sports nutrition food?

Calcium β-hydroxy-β-methylbutyrate (CaHMB)

HMB is an intermediate product of leucine metabolism, which can promote protein synthesis and reduce its decomposition, accelerate fat consumption and delay muscle fatigue.

Stress during strenuous exercise leads to damage to muscle cell membranes, where the rate of protein breakdown exceeds the rate of synthesis, resulting in net protein degradation. HMB can be used to synthesize cholesterol, resulting in rapid repair of muscle cell membranes.

Studies have shown that supplementation with HMB can help improve endurance performance. HMB supplementation at doses ranging from 0.5g/d to 3g/d during strenuous exercise has been shown to have a positive effect on strength gains, lean body mass gain, and body fat loss.

Due to the short half-life of HMB, which is only 2~4h, if a large dose of HMB is taken at one time, the concentration of HMB in the blood will return to normal after a few hours. Therefore, it is recommended that HMB be taken three times a day to help it work better, and HMB is more effective when supplemented with other amino acids.

Lycopene

Studies have shown that lycopene has antioxidant, immune cell activation, cardiovascular protection and anti-aging effects. The antioxidant effect of lycopene is mainly manifested in its high efficiency in bursting single-line oxygen and scavenging peroxyl radicals.

When strenuous exercise, acidic metabolites accumulate, free radicals produce more, attacking tissue cells, causing the degradation or inactivation of nucleic acids, proteins and lipids and other biomolecules, resulting in extensive damage to cell structure and function, manifested as exercise anemia and exhaustion after exercise hemolysis increased, serum enzymes and myoglobin elevated, muscle fatigue produced and delayed muscle soreness and other symptoms.

In addition, lycopene protects phagocytes from their own oxidative damage, promotes the proliferation of T and B lymphocytes, stimulates the function of T cells, enhances the capacity of macrophages, cytotoxic T cells, and natural killer cells (NK), reduces oxidative damage to lymphocyte DNA as well as promotes the production of certain cytokines.

In addition, lycopene has the effect of increasing LDL degradation and lowering LDL(ox) levels, which can protect the cardiovascular and reduce the incidence of cardiovascular disease. Lycopene has the advantages of abundant resources and safety and non-toxicity, and its value has been gradually recognized by people. Although the research and production of lycopene in China is in the initial stage, it still has many advantages.

Chitosan and its derivatives

Recent studies have shown that chitosan and its derivatives have strong total reducing ability, which can effectively remove hydroxyl radicals, superoxide anion, reduce the generation of lipid peroxidation product malondialdehyde (MDA), and increase the activity of superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione peroxidase (GSH- Px).

Xu Qingsong et al. fed mice with low, medium and high (50, 167, 500 mg-kg- 1-d- 1) doses of chitosan for one week, respectively, and found that medium and high doses of chitosan significantly inhibited the elevation of the MDA content in the liver tissues of hepatic injury mice (P<0.01), increased the activity of SOD in the liver tissues (P<0.05), and attenuated the pathological damage of the CCl4 liver cells.

The mechanism of liver protection by chitosan may be due to its good antioxidant activity, which enhances the activity of antioxidant enzymes such as SOD in the body and attenuates the attack of free radicals on lipid and mitochondrial membranes, which in turn reduces the content of MDA, a lipid peroxidation product.

Lycium barbarum polysaccharide

LBP has been widely used in food, however, there are still few studies on the effects of LBP supplementation on the immune function of athletes.

Li Lei’s study suggests that LBP may be rich in SOD, a metalloenzyme that is prevalent in living organisms that can eliminate free radicals, and may be able to regulate humoral immunity through the elimination of free radicals.

Grape polyphenol

In recent years, domestic and foreign studies have shown that grape polyphenols have a variety of functions such as antioxidant, anti-aging, protection of vascular endothelial cells and anti-cancer.

Grape polyphenols are phenolic compounds containing more than two neighboring hydroxyl groups, and the acidic hydroxyl group on the benzene ring has a strong ability to supply hydrogen.

Its antioxidant mechanism is the same as that of other phenolic antioxidants, i.e., it acts as an excellent hydrogen donor, and the free radicals formed can be inactivated by resonance hybridization into stable free radicals, cutting off the chain reaction of free radicals, thus delaying the chain reaction of automatic oxidation of unsaturated fatty acids in fats and oils into hydroperoxides, and playing an antioxidant role.

Fan Haizhen confirmed the good effect of grape polyphenol (OPC) as a natural antioxidant, which can effectively reduce the level of MDA in the skeletal muscle and liver of rats after exhaustive exercise, improve the SOD activity and the total antioxidant capacity of the body, and have a good effect on the elimination of the effects of a large number of free radicals on the body to enhance the ability to exercise and delay the emergence of exercise fatigue.