Can This Supplement Turn Carbs Into Muscle?

June 7, 2023

Transparent Labs “Carb Powder” was Formulated to put “Carbs into Muscle”

The key to a healthy lifestyle isn’t cutting out carbs from your diet, it’s managing the body’s insulin response to carbs. Carbohydrates can build muscle, if used correctly. An overabundance of the wrong carbs, timed wrong, can indeed lead to increased body fat levels due to insulin spiking and other factors. How your body reacts to insulin also has an impact on muscle building, but there are products that can help put the insulin right into your muscles. One of them being Carb Powder, which was developed by Transparent Labs to lower the insulin response every time we eat carbohydrates, to provide blood sugar management and utilize carbohydrates as fuel, preventing them from being stored as fat.

Carbohydrates for Muscle Building

A common misconception in the fitness industry is that carbohydrates will make you fat, and for that reason you will need to cut them out. While consuming an overabundance of the wrong carbohydrates can cause an increase in fat levels, making sure you are getting the right carbs at the right time will actually help you build muscle.

Carbs spike your insulin levels, and when your insulin levels are spiked this can either contribute to your body fat, or your muscle mass. Let’s take a look.

What Is Insulin and How Does it Work?

Let’s be clear, despite a lot of negative misconceptions about insulin, it is an essential hormone, especially when it comes to building muscle mass. Insulin is even used as a PED, usually partnered with other anabolic steroids. Without insulin you would be dead so the preconceived notion that insulin is bad is completely incorrect. Where all the confusion comes from is how insulin functions in your body. When you have a high muscle insulin sensitivity, your muscles are sensitive to the hormone insulin and insulin shuttles carbohydrates into cells to be stored as glycogen.

This is how insulin should function.

The reverse of this is called insulin resistance. When you have insulin resistance, your muscles are resistant to the hormone insulin so instead of insulin shuttling carbohydrates into your muscle cells, they stay in the blood stream, leading to high blood glucose. Since this glucose isn’t used by your muscles it eventually gets turned into body fat. Even worse, the high blood glucose causes inflammation which promotes the development and prognosis of type 2 diabetes.

The key point in all of this is that insulin itself is neither good nor bad, rather it is all relative to how insulin works in your body.

Muscle Insulin Sensitivity

stem cell therapy and muscle growth — Image courtesy of Envato

Muscle insulin sensitivity determines if the nutrients you eat are shuttled into muscle cells or into fat cells.

Let me use some real-world examples to explain. You know buddy at the gym who can eat whatever he wants and never puts on any body fat? He has a very high muscle insulin sensitivity. His muscles are very sensitive to the hormone insulin so the food he eats is shuttled into muscle cells instead of fat cells.

On the other end of the spectrum, know buddy at the gym who just looks at a cup of rice and seems to gain 5 pounds? He has very poor muscle insulin sensitivity (also known as being insulin resistant). Since his muscle are not very sensitive to insulin, the food he eats is shuttled into fat cells instead of muscle cells.

However, products like Carb Powder from Transparent Labs are designed to shuttle insulin right into muscle cells. Let’s break it down.

What is Carb Powder?

Transparent Labs Carb Powder

Carb Powder makes it easy to deliver carbs to your muscles, making sure that you are maximizing your gains.

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Carb Powder from Transparent Labs is a product designed to give you the right amount of carbohydrates, at the right time. Essentially, it is raising your insulin levels at the right time, to maximize potential to build muscle and boost performance. As stated above, “spiking insulin” isn’t necessarily a bad thing because of how essential the hormone is to your body, but consuming nothing but sugary sports drinks and other products of the sort is generally not ideal for athletic performance or muscle building.

This is where Cluster Dextrin® comes in handy as a carbohydrate supplement, which is what Transparent Labs uses in Carb Powder. Cluster Dextrin® is a beneficial source of sustained-release carbohydrates. It is also gentle on the stomach and doesn’t spike insulin levels aggressively like fast-acting carb sources (e.g. dextrose, sucrose, and maltodextrin).

But what exactly is Cluster Dextrin® and how exactly does it work?

Cluster Dextrin®

Your typical sports beverages and carb powders are typically filled with dextrose and maltodextrin. Both of these ingredients are relatively low molecular weight carbohydrates, but they have very high glycemic index scores. Consequently, consuming these carbohydrates creates a short uptick in blood glucose levels. It also causes acute insulin spikes that lead to rapid swings in energy.

To put it simply, Cluster Dextrin® is a patented sports supplement ingredient. It is made from waxy corn starch (amylopectin) using a specific branching enzyme. The carbohydrate that it provides is a novel form of maltodextrin. This form of maltodextrin is known as highly branched cyclic dextrin (HBCD). Typically, maltodextrin is a linear chain of multiple glucose units with a molecular weight range of roughly 400 – 2,000 g/mol.

Now because of robust branching of Cluster Dextrin®, it has an exceptionally high molecular weight of about 400,000 g/mol. To put that into perspective, the molecular weight of dextrose (glucose) is only180 g/mol.

In turn, Cluster Dextrin® has high solubility, very low osmolality, and resists retrogradation.

In case you do not understand what a lot of that means, basically what we are saying is that carbohydrate beverages containing Cluster Dextrin® are much quicker to pass through the stomach and enter the small intestine, while beverages that have glucose, dextrose, and standard maltodextrin happen to do just the opposite.

It also means that Cluster Dextrin® is easier to digest, especially for someone who is physically active. You do not want an upset stomach ruining your training and performance.

Cluster Dextrin® also provides a steady increase in blood sugar levels over time, whereas pure glucose, dextrose, and maltodextrin create temporary and sporadic spikes.

The bottom line is that Cluster Dextrin® will not leave you with swings in your energy levels that can effect your performance, nor will it send your insulin levels through the roof like a lot of other carb supplements.

Carb Powder Ingredients and Nutritional Information

Carb Powder is kept fairly simple on the ingredients side, containing just 24 grams of carbs with 25 grams of Cluster Dextrin®, all for a total of 100 calories.

Is Carb Powder Safe?

As always, we are not doctors at Generation Iron and cannot tell you what to do or what not to do, we can only give you the unbiased facts on topics. With a product like Carb Powder, you may want to consult with an actual physician before purchasing and consuming it.

How Do I use Carb Powder?

Remember, Carb Powder is a dietary supplement, and it is just like any other dietary supplement you may take, such as protein powder or amino acids. All you have to do is mix 1-3 level scoops with 12-20 oz of water (or any beverage of your choice) and consume before, during, and/or after training.

Wrap Up

Overall, carbohydrates are not your enemy, and insulin is not your enemy. While consuming sugary sports drinks as fuel before, during, or after your workouts may spike your insulin in a negative way, there are always better options, Carb Powder is one of them.

Will you be giving Carb Powder a try?

References

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23118793/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2410097/

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29431598/

[4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16190627/

[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25629927/

[6] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28295905/

[7] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29990473/

[8] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19353539/

[9] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3286242/

[10] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3601579/