SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Image 1: I don't know about this "smart ass" in particular, but I would assume you have had enough "smart asses" post their knowledgeable tips on their blogs to get along without another "12 useful tips for 2012" from me, right? I guess at least those of you who have been following this "blog" (I hope that you would agree that the SuppVersity has become more than another "blog") have come to "know" me well enough not to expect me to provide you with the 1001 list of ten, or at it has become fashionable as of late, twelve super-duper congenial tips to achieve your goals in 2012. Change, and this is the one wisdom I want to give you to take along for the next year, change rarely is something that comes over night or is "triggered" by the adherence to any fixed plan . Change is the result of the accumulation of small steps, dx/dt, as we physicists would say, i.e. covering an infinitesimal distance (=dx) within

Image 1: Do you believe that you could solve this profound imbalance by randomly adding more people to both sides of the seesaw? No? Well, why are you taking a high-dose multivitamin then? As the name of this website already implies, I am an outspoken believer in the usefulness of "supplements" (as in "to supplement" = to add to something, where it makes sense ). There is however a particular group of "supplements", which is a real thorn in my side... Yes, I am talking about those one-size-fits-it-all-multivitamin-multimineral-multi-whatever products with "high quality ingredients" the ratios of which are based on either the "recommended dietary allowances" of the omniscient USDA (actually a way better name would be "random dietary allowances") or the even more idiotic maxime that " if some is good, then more is probably even better ". These days every major supplement company has at least one of these formulas

Image 1: Looks like Santa's sweet treats just ricocheted off Adelfo ;-) Although we are amidst the "holiday season" (you know the time of the year where the term off-season gets a whole new meaning ;-), there is one fellow who must obviously have read my blogpost about the not so amiable gifts Santa has in stock for some of us (cf. " Santa is Coming to Town ")... judged by the pictures Adelfo has attached to the latest installment of his amazing " Road to Wheelchair Nationals 2012 " series, Santa's sweet treats must have had a fat-burning, muscle-building effect on him. Well, at least this is what you could think, if you did not know how much hard work and dedication it cost him to get to where he is now. But, I guess I will let him tell you the whole story... Without the "small" things the bigger one's "lose" all their meaning It has been 12 months, now, hwen I got my medical release from the doctor... 12 months f

Image 1: If Chris, "the Techician", Aceto's usually well-informed sources are right and the former Mr Olympia Jay Cutler is currently trying to lose muscle (I heard him say that on Heavy Muscle Radio ), Cutler would be ill advised if he ingested ~20g of non-essential amino acids during and / or in-between extended fasts and hours of arduous low-intensity cardio sessions (img  MuscleTech ) Those of you who followed the " Amino Acids for Super Humans " series I did earlier this year on Carl Lanore's Super Human Radio may remember the arginine < > citrulline < > ornitine cycle and how I tried to explain that, from a physiological perspective, arginine's role in ammonia detox is probably as, if not more important than its role in the production of nitric oxide. What most of you will probably have overheard, or, in the respective shownotes, over-read, was my reference to a 2006 study from the University of Paris , which was - at least to my

Image 1: A mixer like this would be one of the best choices to turn your healthy low-GI sweet (or regular) potato into a high GI "nightmare". If you've read yesterday's first part of the Potato Manifesto , you should by now be aware that the common notion of the pro-diabetic high-glycemic regular potato is another of the numerous black-or-white nutrition myths that do not become right, no matter how many bloggers and forum posters reiterate them. In today's second part of the series I will try to elucidate, whether the sweet potato, of which I would venture to say that she is the "en vogue tuber of the year", is not still the "safer starch alternative" . So bear with me while I am using my scientific peeling knife to check whether there is a bitter truth hidden beneath skin of the sweet potatoes ;-) Come on sweety, show me what's beneath your skin! Now, if we take a look at the literature, a review of the glycemic index of 33 commo

Image 1: The grunty regular (left) and the cute sweet potato (left), which one would you commit your health to? (img. menshealth.co.uk ) This is a blogpost, which eventually turned out to be the first part of a series, is a post with a history, a rather complex one, to be precise. It is rooted (not tubered ;-) in my amazement over the contemporary craving for sweet potatoes within the ever-growing neo-paleolithic community on the Internet and was sparked by the recent publication of a study on sweet potatoes, I stumbled upon on my daily tours of the most recent scientific literature. To make long story short, instead of immediately summarizing the data, drawing some graphs and commenting on the real-world implications of this study, I decided to use the holiday to descend into the archives and take a closer look at what science has to say on the bitter truth about the grunty regula r and the starchy promises of cute sweet potato (cf. image 1 ;-)... When wheat was devils excre