Hydrolyzed alpha-lactalbumin as a source of protein to the exercising

This work describes the effect of feeding enzymatically hydrolyzed a-lactalbumin on blood sugar, albumin and fatty acids, muscular and hepatic glycogen of rats subjected to physical exercise. Three normoenergetic/normoproteic diets, containing either casein (C), alpha-lactalbumin (L) or alpha-lactalbumin hydrolyzate (H) were fed to thirty male Wistar rats for five weeks. During this period, half of the rats swam for 1 hr daily (T category) while the other half remained sedentary (S category). At the end of training, all rats were required to swim to exhaustion. The results showed that those rats of the T-category consuming diet H reached exhaustion with significantly higher concentrations of serum glucose ([H] 56.0 and [L] 32.3 mg/100ml), serum albumin ([H] 3.8 and [L] 2.1 mg/dl) and muscle glycogen ([H] 2.1 and [L] 0.6 mg/g), while no differences were observed between diets regarding the time of arrival to exhaustion. Results from diets C and L differed minimally. It was concluded that feeding the hydrolyzed protein may result in nutritional advantage to the exercising rat. (C) 1998 Elsevier B.V.