When you become sick and your body becomes stressed, your body’s immune system gets kicked into high gear.
When that occurs, your body’s nutritional demands change.
In order to support the immune system and contribute towards recovery, your body requires protein – and a lot of it.
Diet alone won’t supply the amount of protein required to defend against illness.
Where will your body find protein reserves?
Your Lean Muscle Mass.
For example, in burn victims, the need for increased protein can increase tremendously: around 4 g of protein per kilogram of body weight, or about four times the normal daily intake of protein.
Too much protein for a person to consume through a healthy diet.
This demand for protein exceeds the demands put on the body during fasting (times where you aren’t bringing in calories), which is when muscle breakdown occurs.
The same trend was also found in cancer survivors. In those whose overall body protein decreased due to cancer and cancer therapy, the rate of recurrence of cancer increased.
In both cases, the ability to survive these serious conditions ultimately came down to how much Lean Muscle Mass each patient had to begin with, and how much their bodies lost due to increased demand for protein.
Bottom line: your Lean Muscle Mass can act as protein reserves that your body can draw off of when the immune system is triggered.
If you have built sufficient Lean Muscle Mass through diet and workout, your body will have a much easier time fighting off infection because it will have enough protein in reserve to power the demands caused by the immune system.
If you don’t have sufficient Lean Muscle Mass, your body will have a much more difficult time defeating and recovering from illnesses because it won’t have the type of nutrients it needs to power the immune system.
