For all corporate professionals, it's not easy to always stay at a high peak performance when the environment demands our physical and mental energy. However, we can tweak our diet with protein-rich food or snacks that could improve our overall health.
Protein is a crucial nutrient to support some of our body functions. With a healthy body and mind, fueled by protein, we can reach greater heights and tackle tough challenges.
Why protein is essential for corporate professionals?
With proper food or snack planning, we can achieve a protein-rich diet throughout the day and reap the benefits from it. One excellent option is adding the best nuts for protein into your diet. Below are the five reasons of why protein is an essential nutrient for working professionals.
1) Improve Physical Endurance with Protein
It's a misconception that office professionals only deplete mental energy; our physical energy is drained as well, especially since many of us sit all day long in the office facing a screen.
We can enhance our physical energy and endurance by consuming protein-rich foods or snacks like almonds. Protein is a necessary nutrient that helps with physical endurance, muscle repair, and growth.
It is necessary to consume protein to prevent our muscles from weakening due to old age and lack of exercise. By ensuring our body has the required daily protein intake, we can become more resilient and less prone to fatigue when tackling challenges at work.
2) Protein Helps with Weight Management
Due to daily work stress, we often neglect our health, especially with our unhealthy diet of processed foods or snacks. Weight gain starts to sneak up on us with our less active lifestyle.
However, consuming a protein-rich food or snack can aid in weight management because of its appetite-reducing properties. It helps to enhance satiety which makes us feel fuller longer and we will not feel the need to consume more food in between our main meals.
If you feel like snacking, you can consume pistachios that is high in protein, fiber and low in calories. The nuts also provide several health benefits with their nutrient-rich content.
3) Protein Provide Metabolic Support
Another factor that affects our weight is also due to our body's metabolism. As we get older, our metabolism declines, resulting in a slower rate of burning calories. When we neglect our health and diet, other than weight gain, our body could lose muscle mass, and lead to a lower metabolism as well.
It is much harder for protein to digest than carbohydrates and fats. Our body burn more calories when digesting protein. In turn, this process helps to increase metabolism.
Furthermore, some food or nuts such as cashews contain magnesium, and with protein, they help with increasing our metabolism and burning more calories.
4) Protein Stabilized Blood Sugar
Protein provides one of the functions in stabilizing our blood sugar levels because it takes longer to digest, this prevents our blood sugar from spiking and crashing.
When our blood sugar fluctuates this could cause difficulty in concentrating or even cause mood swings. As corporate professionals, we need to maintain our professionalism in interpersonal interaction and we wouldn't want our mood to affect our work.
Adequate protein intake can help to maintain our blood sugar levels which help to keep our mood swings at bay. Having a snack such as pecans provides a moderate amount of protein and gradual release of glucose into the bloodstream to prevent our blood sugar from fluctuating too much.
5) Improve Cognitive Function with Protein Intake
A healthy cognitive health is one of the most crucial aspects for corporate professionals. It is our mental ability to process critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making.
According to an article, some of the Protein amino acids that could be found in nuts like walnuts are beneficial to our brain health by improving cell communication. Walnuts also contain omega-3 which contains properties that help with our cognitive health as well.
Protein not only benefits us physically but also benefits us mentally especially corporate professionals who have to utilize their mental energy all the time.
Protein is Important But So as Other Nutrients
Having protein-rich foods or snacks in the diet of corporate professionals is essential and helps to support both physical and mental performance. Protein can help to support our physical endurance, aid in weight management, increase metabolism, stabilize blood sugars, and improve cognitive function.
By consuming nuts like almonds, pistachios, cashews, pecans, and walnuts, professionals can benefit not just from protein, but also from a wide range of nutrients such as healthy fats, fiber, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals. When eaten in moderation, they also provide many health benefits and are generally low in calories but with wholesome nutrition.
Reference List
1. National Institutes of Health (NIH) - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK224629/
