Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore)

Cardiac Rehab Physician | India's First Advance Cardiac Rehab | Physician Supervised Exercise Based Cardiac Rehab | Reverse Remodelling of Myocardium

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

Wide awake at midnight again?

Exhausted all day, yet the moment your head hits the pillow, your brain refuses to switch off.

Here is the physiology almost nobody explains, and why the fix is the opposite of what you would guess.

THE TRAP

Your sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight response, is what keeps you alert, focused and reactive through a demanding day. That is its job.

The trouble begins when it never stands down.

Under chronic stress, sympathetic activity stays elevated around the clock. It does not obligingly switch off at bedtime. You feel tired, but physiologically your body is still braced for action. That is why restful, uninterrupted sleep becomes so hard to reach.

The system keeping you alert is the same system blocking your sleep.

TO REMOVE A NEEDLE, YOU NEED ANOTHER NEEDLE

Most people respond by trying to rest harder. More lying down. More screen time in bed. More effort to relax.

It rarely works, because rest is not what breaks a stress loop.

There is an old idea that captures the solution precisely: to remove a needle, you need another needle.

The way out of chronic stress is a controlled dose of the right kind of stress. That is exactly what exercise is.

THE PARADOX: ACUTE VERSUS CHRONIC

Here is where it gets counterintuitive.

A single workout does stimulate your sympathetic nervous system. In the moment, exercise raises stress, not lowers it. This is where most people get confused and conclude exercise cannot possibly help them sleep.

But look at months rather than minutes.

Long term endurance training increases parasympathetic activity and decreases sympathetic activity in the human heart at rest. The short term spike is the very stimulus that drives the long term adaptation. Each session nudges the system. Over time, your resting autonomic balance shifts in the opposite direction to where it started.

WHAT THE DATA SHOWS

The effect size here is not subtle.

Six months of aerobic exercise training raised resting heart rate variability, a direct index of parasympathetic tone, by 17% in young adults and by 68% in older adults.

Older adults gained the most. Parasympathetic control of the heart naturally declines with age, and regular endurance exercise measurably slows that decline.

WHY YOUR HEART CARES ABOUT YOUR SLEEP

This is not simply about waking up refreshed.

A meta analysis of 17 studies covering more than 500,000 participants found a U shaped relationship between sleep duration and coronary heart disease, with the lowest risk at seven to eight hours per night. Compared with seven hours, coronary heart disease risk rises approximately 11% for each hour of sleep lost.

Sleep is not a luxury sitting outside your cardiovascular risk profile. It sits inside it.

THE BOTTOM LINE

You are not wearing your body out when you train.

You are giving your brain the biological permission to finally shut down.

Build your endurance to reclaim your sleep and protect your heart.

REFERENCES

Yamamoto K, Miyachi M, Saitoh T, et al. Effect of endurance exercise on autonomic control of heart rate. Sports Medicine, 2003.

Levy WC, Cerqueira MD, Harp GD, et al. Effect of endurance exercise training on heart rate variability at rest in healthy young and older men. American Journal of Cardiology, 1998.

Wang D, Li W, Cui X, et al. Sleep duration and risk of coronary heart disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies. International Journal of Cardiology, 2016.

Dr Muralidar Babi, MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore)
Founder, Cardiac Rehab and Telangana Runners

https://t.co/O3QP93tlcS

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

Wide awake at midnight again? ⏱️

If you missed your afternoon nap but are still staring at the ceiling, exhausted yet unable to switch off, your nervous system is trapped in a loop.

The system that keeps your brain on high alert during the day—the sympathetic nervous system (your "fight-or-flight" response)—is the exact same system preventing you from getting restful sleep. Chronic overuse of this system keeps you wired, making uninterrupted rest physically impossible.

The solution? You have to use a needle to remove a needle. 🪡

Here is the paradox: Acute exercise initially stimulates the sympathetic nervous system. However, engaging in consistent, moderate-to-long duration endurance training forces a profound biological adaptation. It ultimately enhances parasympathetic nervous system tone—your body's crucial "rest and digest" mode—while simultaneously suppressing chronic sympathetic overdrive.

You aren't just wearing your muscles out; you are giving your brain the biological permission to finally shut down.

This isn't just about feeling tired. Chronic sleep deprivation (sleeping fewer than six hours) is a highly documented, direct risk factor that significantly increases your risk of myocardial infarction (heart attacks) and coronary heart disease.

Build your endurance to reclaim your sleep, drastically reduce your cardiovascular risk, and protect your heart.

Support our vision to prevent heart disease before it starts. Start building endurance into your daily life and join us at the Cardiac Rehab Run! 🏃🏽‍♂️💨
References

Wei, R., Duan, X., & Guo, L. (2022). Effects of sleep deprivation on coronary heart disease. The Korean Journal of Physiology & Pharmacology, 26(5), 297–305. https://t.co/02gbMiQW0a
Cited by: 29

Zhao, R. (n.d.). Effects of Long-Term Moderate-Intensity Exercise on Autonomic Nervous System Dysfunction Induced by Cardiac Neurovascular Interface Deterioration.
Cited by: 3

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Dr Muralidar Babi, MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore)
Founder, Cardiac Rehab and Telangana Runners

#TelanganaRunners #TelanganaMarathon #CardiacRehab #CardiacRehabFoundation #muralidarbabi

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

"Running will damage your knees." You have heard this from a relative, a colleague, maybe even a doctor, and here is the uncomfortable part: it is published in research. But read the fine print. Those studies looked at elite and ultra runners, people running five to six hours a day for twenty to thirty years of a professional career (Vingard et al., long distance running and hip OA risk). That is the population carrying higher arthritis risk, not the everyday runner.

Somewhere along the way, that nuance got compressed into four words: "Running causes arthritis." That is a hybrid statement, manufactured by people looking for an excuse not to start running.

You are not an elite athlete. You are a recreational runner. You do not run five hours a day for three decades. And the evidence for people like you says the opposite of the myth. A landmark systematic review and meta-analysis in the Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy found that recreational runners had a lower occurrence of osteoarthritis than both competitive runners and sedentary controls, while a separate review found recreational runners carry roughly a three-fold lower prevalence of knee and hip arthritis compared with people who do not run at all.

Now here is the science that should genuinely fascinate you. Every organ in your body has its own blood supply, one vessel bringing nutrition, another removing waste. Cartilage has none. So how does it eat? Cartilage behaves like a sponge. Load the knee joint, and cartilage compresses, squeezing waste fluid out into the joint space. Unload it, and cartilage expands, drawing in fresh, nutrient-rich synovial fluid. Load, unload, load, unload, that rhythm is literally how your cartilage feeds itself.

Every step you take is a meal for your knee. The sedentary person and the ultra marathoner sit at opposite ends of the same risk curve. You want to live in the middle. Your knees were not designed to be protected in stillness, they were designed to be used.

Recreational running is good for your knee joint. Start building your endurance.

Save this. Send it to the person who keeps telling you running will ruin your knees.

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Dr Muralidar Babi
MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore)
Founder, Telangana Runners

#TelanganaRunners #TelanganaMarathon #CardiacRehab #CardiacRehabFoundation #muralidarbabi

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

Right now, as you read this, your heart is beating. It has been beating every second since before you were born, and it has never once run mainly on sugar.

Up to 90% of the fuel your heart burns, every single hour of every single day, comes from fat.

This is not a diet trend. This is basic cardiac physiology. Your heart is a muscle, and like every muscle built to work for long hours without rest, it has learned to prefer fat as fuel over anything else.

Here is why this matters to you. When you train your body for endurance, walking, jogging, running, cycling for sustained periods, your other muscles start doing exactly what your heart already does. They switch on their fat burning machinery. That is the real reason endurance training helps you lose weight. It is not magic. It is your muscles learning your heart's own trick.

And this is where prevention begins. Overweight and obesity are among the leading reasons people suffer heart attacks. When your muscles get better at burning fat, that fat has less chance to accumulate, clog arteries, and put your heart at risk.

Move long. Burn fat. Protect your heart.

Save this post. Send it to someone you want to keep around for a long time.

Join our vision to prevent heart attacks. Support the Cardiac Rehab Run.

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@TelanganaRunners Building Fitter Telangana

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[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

Look how much glucose is consumed by the brain, and by muscle. The difference will change how you think about blood sugar control. 🧠💪

The brain cannot use fat as fuel. It exclusively runs on glucose — every single calorie of brain energy comes from the glucose in your blood.

And yet, after you eat a meal, the brain's capacity to lower your blood glucose is only around 10 percent.

On the other side, muscle, which can burn both glucose and fat, is responsible for clearing around 90 percent of the glucose from your blood after a meal.

This is not because the brain suddenly does less work. Its glucose use stays fairly constant, fed or fasted. It is because muscle responds directly to insulin, opening thousands of glucose gates called GLUT4 transporters, pulling glucose out of the blood far faster and in far greater volume than any other organ in the body.

So if you are someone struggling to keep your blood sugar under control, what should actually be the priority? Eating less sugar, or using your muscles more?

High blood glucose, left uncontrolled, is one of the leading paths to a heart attack. Building endurance activates the single largest glucose clearing system in your body, your skeletal muscle, and this directly helps prevent that outcome.

Join our vision to prevent early heart attacks. Support the Cardiac Rehab Run. 🏃

🌐 https://t.co/N7Fp43Vh9e

Run with Science. 🏃

#TelanganaRunners #TelanganaMarathon #CardiacRehab #CardiacRehabFoundation #muralidarbabi

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

You found out your Vitamin D is low and started going for morning walks. It's a good habit — but it will not fix your Vitamin D. Here is why the timing matters more than the effort. ☀️

Morning and evening sunlight is dominated by red and near-infrared wavelengths. When the sun is low on the horizon, the shorter UV rays are completely absorbed by the thick layer of atmosphere they must travel through, leaving only the longer red and infrared wavelengths to reach the Earth's surface.

These wavelengths do something powerful. They are absorbed by cytochrome c oxidase, a key enzyme inside your mitochondria, which responds by producing more ATP — the energy currency of every cell in your body. The result is reduced fatigue, faster muscle recovery, and improved cellular efficiency. This is precisely why elite athletes use red and near-infrared light therapy, before competition to prime their muscles and after training to accelerate recovery.

But this light will never produce Vitamin D. That requires UVB radiation, a completely different and shorter wavelength, which only reaches the Earth's surface when the UV index is above 3 — between 10 AM and 4 PM, peaking around midday.

Here is a simple test: step outside and check your shadow. If your shadow is taller than you, the sun is too low and no UVB is reaching you. No UVB means no Vitamin D, regardless of how long you stand in that light.

Your body actually needs sunlight twice a day, for completely different reasons. Morning and evening sun repairs your mitochondria and fuels your cells. Midday sun builds your Vitamin D.

The answer is not morning or afternoon. The answer is both.

Run with Science. 🏃

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[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

Narrow pipes, high pressure. Wider pipes, lower pressure. This is basic physics — and it is exactly what is happening inside your blood vessels right now. 🫀

A healthy heart pumps blood through its vessels at 120 over 80. That is normal pressure through healthy, elastic, open pipes. But when years of inactivity, poor diet, and chronic stress cause those vessels to narrow and stiffen, the heart has no choice but to generate more pressure to push blood through. That is hypertension, and it silently damages the heart, kidneys, and brain for years before it declares itself.

Now here is what endurance training actually does to those pipes.

As a long-term vascular adaptation to regular running and endurance exercise, the internal diameter of your blood vessels increases and their walls become more elastic. The pipes get wider. The same amount of blood now flows through with far less pressure, and the heart works significantly less hard at rest.

This is exactly why endurance athletes consistently have resting blood pressures below normal. Their cardiovascular plumbing has been structurally remodelled by training.

Research confirms this at scale. A meta-analysis across 72 clinical trials found that endurance training reduces resting blood pressure by an average of 3 to 7 mmHg, with the greatest reduction seen in people who already have hypertension, precisely the people who need it most.

Hypertension is one of the leading causes of heart attacks. Building endurance widens your vessels, lowers your pressure, and directly lowers your risk.

Join our mission to prevent early heart attacks. Support the Cardiac Rehab Run. 🏃

🌐 https://t.co/N7Fp43Vh9e

Run with Science. 🏃

#TelanganaRunners #TelanganaMarathon #CardiacRehab #CardiacRehabFoundation #muralidarbabi

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

Diabetics and non-diabetics absorb sugar from food at exactly the same speed. The real difference is what happens after. 🩺

Here's something almost nobody explains correctly about diabetes.

When a diabetic person and a non-diabetic person eat the exact same meal, the amount of sugar entering their blood, and the speed at which it enters, is identical. Digestion doesn't care whether you're diabetic. It works the same way for everyone.

Add more fibre to that meal, and the entry slows down for both people equally. Split it into smaller, more frequent meals, and less sugar enters the blood at any one time, again, equally for both.

So if entry is identical either way, why does one person's blood sugar spiral out of control while the other's stays fine?

Because high blood sugar was never a problem of how you eat or what you eat. It is a problem of glucose not being consumed by the body once it's already there. Diabetics struggle with clearing glucose from the blood, not absorbing it differently.

This is exactly why diet alone is only half the solution. Diet manages how much glucose enters. It does nothing to fix how much actually gets used up.

Building endurance switches on the single largest glucose-consuming engine in your body, your skeletal muscle. Regular endurance training continuously pulls glucose out of your bloodstream, directly addressing the real problem, and lowering your long-term risk of a heart attack in the process.

Join our mission to prevent early heart attacks. Support the Cardiac Rehab Run. 🏃
🌐 https://t.co/N7Fp43Vh9e
Run with Science. 🏃

#TelanganaRunners #TelanganaMarathon #CardiacRehab #CardiacRehabFoundation #muralidarbabi

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

High blood sugar isn't about too much glucose getting in. It's about glucose that can't get out. Almost nobody explains this. 🩺

If you or someone in your family is diabetic, here is the science that rarely gets said out loud.

Diabetes is usually framed as "too much sugar entering the blood." But that is not the root problem. The real problem is insulin resistance — your cells, especially muscle cells, stop responding properly to insulin's signal to let glucose in. So glucose piles up in the blood not because too much is arriving, but because it cannot leave.

This is exactly why small meals, high fibre diets, and low glycemic foods, while genuinely useful, are only addressing half the equation. They slow down how fast glucose enters the blood. They do nothing to fix the real problem: glucose that is already there and cannot exit.

And this is precisely why so many heart attack survivors never knew they were diabetic until the attack already happened. Silent, unresolved high blood sugar quietly damages blood vessels for years with no symptoms, until the heart pays the price.

Here is the genuinely hopeful part. Exercise opens a second door for glucose to leave the blood, completely bypassing the broken insulin pathway. When your muscles contract during running or endurance training, they pull glucose out of the blood through a separate mechanism that does not depend on insulin at all. Research confirms this pathway stays fully functional even in diabetics whose insulin signalling has failed.

So when you build your endurance, you are not just getting fitter. You are switching on the single biggest glucose-consuming machine in your entire body — your own skeletal muscle.

Diet controls how much comes in. Exercise controls how much leaves. You need both, and most people are only doing one.

This World Heart Day, choose the side of prevention.

Join the Cardiac Rehab Run, 13th September 2026.

Run with Science. 🏃

#TelanganaRunners #TelanganaMarathon #CardiacRehab #CardiacRehabFoundation #muralidarbabi

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

1.When a muscle contracts, it never takes fuel from the local fat….why ?? There is no such connections between fat and muscle

2.Your muscle take fuel from two sources only, one which is already stored inside and other one has to come from blood.

3.Even that fuel that is coming from blood has such a very long lengthy path, fuel under the skin or liver has to go into venous system, go into ur right side of the heart, go into the lungs and come back to the left side of the heart and from there it enters the arterial system and then muscle.

4. So your side bend will not remove Side fat, squats will not remove hip and thigh fat, arm exercise will not remove arm fat

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

A glass of sugar water can show you exactly what's happening inside your blood right now. 🧪

Pour glucose water into a transparent glass and drain it immediately. The glass stays clear. Now let glucose water sit in that same glass for a day, then drain it. A faint white coating appears. Let it sit for a week instead, and the coating turns thick and unmistakable.

The longer the glucose touches the glass, the more it leaves behind.

Your blood works on the exact same principle. Your red blood cells circulate for about three months, and glucose molecules continuously and permanently attach to the hemoglobin inside them, through a process called glycation. Once attached, it never comes off for that cell's lifetime.

The thickness of that sugar coating on your red blood cells is exactly what your HbA1c blood test measures. The higher your average blood sugar over the past three months, the thicker the coating, and the higher your HbA1c number. This is also exactly why HbA1c can't be tricked by one good day of eating; it reflects months of accumulated exposure, not a single snapshot.

So how do you genuinely bring that number down? You reduce how much glucose stays circulating in your blood, consistently, over months.

Building endurance switches on the single largest glucose-consuming engine in your body, your skeletal muscle. Regular endurance training continuously pulls glucose out of your bloodstream, lowering your HbA1c and reducing your long-term risk of a heart attack.

Join our mission to prevent heart attacks. Support the Cardiac Rehab Run. 🏃

🌐 https://t.co/N7Fp43Vh9e

Run with Science. 🏃

#TelanganaRunners #TelanganaMarathon #CardiacRehab #CardiacRehabFoundation #muralidarbabi

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

Why does a diabetic rush to the washroom, and why does a gym-goer's muscle look fuller within weeks? It's the same hidden science. 💧

The answer lies in one property of glucose: it is hygroscopic. It attracts and holds water. Wherever glucose goes, water follows.

In diabetes, when blood sugar runs high, glucose spills into the urine, where it should never appear. Once inside the bladder, that glucose drags water along with it through osmosis. The bladder fills far faster than usual, and the person feels the urge to urinate again and again. This is called osmotic diuresis, and it is exactly why excessive thirst and frequent urination are among the earliest warning signs of diabetes.

Now here's the fascinating part. The very same science plays out inside the muscles of someone doing weight training.

When you train with weights, your muscles adapt by storing more glucose as glycogen. But glycogen never sits alone. Research shows that every 1 gram of glycogen is stored bound to roughly 3 to 4 grams of water. So as your muscles pack in more glycogen, they pull in three to four times that weight in water.

This is the part most people never realise: a large share of the muscle bulk gained in the early months of weight training is actually glucose and water, not protein. The fibre swells with stored fuel and bound water, creating that fuller, pumped look, while the real increase in contractile protein is small and builds far more slowly.

This explains what every gym-goer has seen. Why muscles look fuller within weeks, far faster than real protein growth allows. Why the scale can climb even as you get leaner. Why muscle size visibly shrinks when you stop training or cut carbohydrates, as the glycogen and its water drain away.

So next time someone says their muscle is all protein, remember the real chemistry. Glucose pulls water wherever it goes, in the bladder of a diabetic and in the muscle of a lifter alike.

Run with Science. 🏃

#TelanganaRunners #TelanganaMarathon #CardiacRehab #CardiacRehabFoundation #muralidarbabi

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

After weights you raid the fridge. After a run you forget to eat. Same body, opposite hunger — and the science explains exactly why. 🏃‍♂️🏋️

Most people assume any workout makes you hungry. The research tells a more interesting story — your type of training quietly decides your appetite.

Here's what the science shows. In a landmark study, a vigorous 60-minute run shifted two appetite hormones — it suppressed ghrelin (your hunger hormone) and raised PYY (a fullness hormone). A 90-minute weight session moved only one — it nudged ghrelin, but left PYY largely unchanged. The conclusion: aerobic exercise suppresses appetite more powerfully, and for longer, than resistance training does.

That's the short-term picture. Over the long term, the gap widens. Some studies show that weeks of resistance training can actually raise appetite through hormones like orexin — your body demanding more fuel to build and bulk muscle. Endurance running does the opposite — it keeps your hunger signalling dialled down, helping the body stay lean and light.

So the real driver is the volume of each type of exercise in your week. More hours under the barbell means a bigger appetite, more frequent eating, and more muscle and water weight. More hours running means suppressed appetite, lighter eating, and leaner body composition.

This is why so many people train hard in the gym but the scale won't move — the bigger muscle and the bigger appetite both quietly work against fat loss.

So if weight loss is your primary goal, where should you spend more of your time — weights or running?

The honest answer: lead with running. Endurance training is the more effective appetite regulator and fat burner, so it should take the larger share of your week when fat loss is the goal. Keep resistance training in the mix — it protects muscle and metabolism — but if the scale isn't moving, the fix is usually more running, not more lifting.

Don't out-eat your workout. Let running quiet the hunger, and let your biology do the heavy lifting.

Run with Science. 🏃

#TelanganaRunners #TelanganaMarathon #CardiacRehab #CardiacRehabFoundation #muralidarbabi

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

Your muscles SHRINK with running. Your muscles GROW with weights. Same muscle, opposite result — and almost everyone misreads what it means. 🏃‍♂️🏋️

Here is the actual physiology behind a misunderstanding that has confused runners and gym-goers for years.

When you train for endurance, your muscle fibres become smaller, denser, and far more efficient. The body increases mitochondrial density — the cellular engines that burn fat — and expands the capillary network supplying blood and oxygen. The muscle gets leaner and more powerful per gram, but slightly smaller. This creates the false belief: "Running is making me lose muscle." You are not losing muscle — you are upgrading its engine.

With resistance training, the opposite happens. The fibre grows in size, packing in more protein, glycogen and water. But here is what most people don't know — resistance training produces mitochondrial dilution, as fibres grow faster than mitochondrial number increases, lowering mitochondrial density. The muscle gets bigger and stronger, but its fat-burning density per gram drops. Hence the second false belief: "I train so hard but the scale won't move." The bigger muscle holds more glycogen and water — so your weight can even rise while you get leaner.

So if your goal is weight loss, where should you start?

Don't chase the number on the scale. Chase the engine inside your muscle.

Run with Science. 🏃

#TelanganaRunners #TelanganaMarathon #CardiacRehab #CardiacRehabFoundation #muralidarbabi

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

Taking the science of endurance to the future of horticulture. 🌱🏃

Yesterday, we had the honour of conducting a workshop at Sri Konda Laxman Telangana Horticultural University — the only horticultural university in Telangana, and the fourth of its kind in the country, named after the veteran freedom fighter and Telangana protagonist Sri Konda Laxman Bapuji.

We spoke with students, faculty, and staff about building endurance, preventing early heart attacks, and why cardiovascular health is the foundation on which every other ambition is built. From those who study how plants grow, to those learning how to nourish a state — the same truth applies to the human body: consistency, movement, and endurance build a life that lasts.

A heartfelt thank you to the university leadership, faculty, and students for the warm welcome and genuine engagement. When an institution dedicated to cultivating life invests in the wellbeing of its own people, it sets a powerful example for the entire community.

This is what the Cardiac Rehab Foundation and Telangana Runners stand for — taking real science out of the clinic and into the universities, workplaces, and communities of Telangana.

Run with Science. 🏃

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#TelanganaRunners #TelanganaMarathon #CardiacRehab #CardiacRehabFoundation #muralidarbabi

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

You have been lied to about protein — and the lie was retracted by its own author in 1981. 🌱

For decades, an entire generation has been taught that animal protein is “complete” and plant protein is “incomplete.” This single classification is one of the most persistent errors in the history of nutrition science. Here is what the data actually says.

The “complete vs incomplete” framework was a teaching shortcut — never a physiological law. The WHO/FAO/UNU expert consultation formally abandoned the classification, affirming that protein adequacy depends on total amino acid intake, not single-source “completeness.”

The biochemistry is unambiguous. All dietary protein is hydrolysed into free amino acids and small peptides before absorption. Your enterocytes — the cells lining your gut — cannot distinguish “animal” from “plant.” Every protein you eat enters one shared metabolic amino acid pool, from which your body builds whatever it needs.

The quality metrics confirm it. Soy protein isolate scores 1.0 on PDCAAS — identical to egg white and casein. On the newer DIAAS scale, blended plant sources comfortably meet requirements at adequate intake.

Now the most powerful argument of all.
From 6 months of age to adulthood, human skeletal muscle increases roughly 17-fold — the single largest anabolic demand of the entire human lifespan. This happens identically in vegetarian and non-vegetarian children, on protein intakes a fraction of what supplement marketing claims you need.

If plant protein were truly inadequate, the consequences would be visible across the more than 400 million vegetarians in India — stunting, weakness, cognitive deficit. No such population-level divergence exists. Controlled trials confirm equal muscle hypertrophy when total protein is matched.

The same protein that grew every organ in your body 17-fold cannot, somehow, build a single adult bicep?

It was never science. It was the foundation of a global supplement economy.

Run with Science. 🏃

#TelanganaRunners #TelanganaMarathon #CardiacRehab #CardiacRehabFoundation #muralidarbabi

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

Vegetarian protein is incomplete. Non-vegetarian protein is complete. This is the biggest marketing blunder ever sold to humanity and you have believed it your entire life. 🌱

Modern nutrition science calls this what it actually is: a teaching shortcut that became a marketing weapon.

The "complete vs incomplete" idea was popularised by Frances Moore Lappé in 1971 in Diet for a Small Planet. Ten years later, she publicly retracted the claim and admitted she was wrong. But by then, the protein supplement industry had built itself on the myth — and refused to let go.

Here is the real science.

Every plant food contains all 9 essential amino acids. Rice, dal, lentils, quinoa, tofu, beans, peas, nuts, seeds every single one. The difference is not whether amino acids are present, but in what proportion. And the human body solves that elegantly.

When you eat dal-rice, your digestive system breaks every protein — animal or plant — into individual amino acids. These enter a circulating amino acid pool in your blood, and your body builds whatever it needs from there. The amino acids from a chicken leg and from a chickpea are biochemically identical once digested.

Modern scoring confirms this. Soy protein isolate scores 1.0 on PDCAAS — the same as egg white. Plant-based athletes build the same muscle and strength as omnivores when total protein is matched.

And here is the paradox.

The same vegetable protein that built every organ in your body over 20 years of childhood — your brain, your heart, your liver, your kidneys — is now suddenly called waste, garbage, useless when you want to add a few kilos of muscle.

The protein that built the entire human cannot build a bicep?

Read that sentence again. That is the biggest paradox in modern nutrition.

Eat dal. Eat rice. Eat lentils. Eat curd. Eat meat and eggs if you choose. But never again believe that one is complete and the other is incomplete. Your body does not know the difference. Only marketing does.

Run with Science. 🏃

#TelanganaRunners #TelanganaMarathon #CardiacRehab #CardiacRehabFoundation #muralidarbabi

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

We brought the science of endurance to the team at Nav Tech Electronics today. ⚡🏃

When we talk about heart health, we often think of hospitals, medicines, and emergency rooms. But the truth is — heart health is built years before any symptom ever appears. It is built in the small daily decisions, the consistency of movement, and the discipline of endurance.

Today, we had the privilege of conducting a workshop at Nav Tech Electronics on the real science of preventing early heart attacks. We spoke about why endurance — not just exercise — is the foundation of long-term cardiovascular health, how the body adapts to sustained activity, and the simple habits that can protect your heart for decades.

A huge thank you to the Nav Tech Electronics team for their warmth, their curiosity, and their commitment to building a healthier workplace. When a company invests in the wellbeing of its people, it is investing in something far greater than productivity — it is investing in lives, families, and futures.

This is what the Cardiac Rehab and Telangana Runners stand for — taking real science out of the clinic and into the workplaces, communities, and homes of Telangana. If your organisation would like to host a session on heart health and endurance, please reach out to us.

Let’s build a fitter, healthier Telangana — one workplace at a time. Run with Science. 🏃

🌐 https://t.co/IRu536Vv7H | https://t.co/O3QP93sNnk #TelanganaRunners #TelanganaMarathon #CardiacRehab #CardiacRehabFoundation #muralidarbabi

[Muralidar Babi MBBS, MD (CMC Vellore) @doctormurali]

Your mid-workout protein shake isn’t doing what you think it is. 🏃 #TelanganaRunners #TelanganaMarathon #CardiacRehab #CardiacRehabFoundation #muralidarbabi