SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Image 1: Monkey milk tea by Conchibi . No matter how decorative it may look, according to various online sources, the milky monkey decoration is just about to annihilate the beneficial health effects of tea at the very moment it mingles with the antioxidant brew... or is this just another urban myth that is reaffirmed by ' gurus ' all over the Internet? Question from Samir Banga ( via Facebook ): "Just wanted to ask you about tea and if adding milk or cream for that matter disturbs or destroys the antioxidants/good stuff in the tea . Also would this be the same with black, green and white tea?" Answer Dr. Andro: This is one of the typical cases where just typing in a question in Google produces either answer A "tea with milk = no problem" or answer B "tea with milk = worthless swill" - it just depends on how you formulate the question - or maybe who on whether the milk industry advertises with Google? Who knows.... A more thorough investigat

Image 1: Attention reading SuppVersity posts and following respective advice may have desirable ergogenic (side-)effects ;-) Does your life rock? No? Did your last gym session suck? Yes? Well, maybe you just don't inject the right gear into your auricle (ear). We all know that listening to music can profoundly influence the way we feel. In the course of the last 20 years scientists from all around the world have been investigating how these musically triggered emotional changes relate to hormonal, neurocrine and even immunological changes and mechanisms and have found, time and again, that music "provides the simplest solution" for symptoms such as pain and hyperactivity, in the treatment of which, "[t]oday, an emphasis has been placed on pharmacological substances" ( Gangrade. 2011 ). Even the idea to substitute your stimulant-loaden preworkout supplement with a full dose of techno music is thus not as outrageou

Image 1: Most commercially available products still have a mixture of the active 10,12 CLA and the inactive 9,11 CLA. If you read the first installment of the SuppVersity Student Spotlight , and/or listened to our now famous SuppVersity student, Duong, on Carl Lenore's Super Human Radio, yesterday , you'll know that Duong's approach to intermittent fasting delivered impressive muscle gains, even on a caloric deficit! But what if you are lean already? Regardless of whether or not you fast intermittently, eating a hypocaloric diet (i.e. eating less calories than you need) does not appear to be the ideal strategy to "bulk", does it? Well, a group of international scientists from Denmark, the US, France and Germany recently found that CLA, or Trans-10, cis-12 Conjugated Linoleic Acid, to be precise, could possibly ward off fat gains by decreasing the amount of fat that is produced and getting stored in your adipose

Image 1: There is more to a strong core than just the m. rectus abdominis aka 'the abs' (red);  its imperative to train your obliques (blue) and the muscle strands of the erector spinae muscles which stabilize your spine (violette) " 6 weeks to 6-pack abs " - although we all know that this is unattainable for the majoritity of beer-bellied casual Men's Health reader, headlines like that still make the sales of today's fitness magazines go up. On the other hand, Charles Atlas, John Grimek, Ray Parks, Eugen Sandow and the other fathers of physical culture would certainly turn in their graves, if they saw the metrosexual size zero bans on the covers of respective 'lifestyle' magazines and read about the 'cult of sculpted abs' that has befallen their 'grandchildren'... well, I guess you don't care about those 'grandpas', let alone my rants, and still want your sixpack to shine in its full glory on the next spring break, n

Image 1: You can probably get some cheap betaine (TMG) from your local fishing (not vitamin) shop. Sometimes, the thing we have been looking for has been there all along. And, no, I am not talking about the love of your life, but the cheap, effective and side-effect free anti-catabolic ergogenic every hard training athlete and fitness fanatic could benefit from. It turns out, Betaine, or trimethyl-gylcine (TMG), the methylated version of the relatively unknown amino acid glycine could be just that: a readily available, cheap ergogenic with the ability to safely modulate your hormonal training response in a way that will actually translate into real world performance increments. It is not without reason that I underline the importance of real world performance increments against impressive figures on a (oftentimes unrealiable) lab report. What's the use of the 40% increase in testosterone supplement X has been shown to provide, w

Image 1: The yellow bone marrrow fat turns out to be more than a filler. In Germany there is a common saying that is predominantly used by the mothers of fat kids: "My son, overweight? No. He just has some really heavy bones." Well, I guess few of these proud mothers will be aware that recent research from the Boston Medical School ( Fulzele. 2011 ) and the University of Toledo suggests that there may be more to the bone-bodyweight connection than even they may have thought. In a comprehensive review of the latest findings on bone metabolism ( Fulzele. 2011 ) Keertik Fulzele and Thomas L. Clemens state that the " contemporary model [which] assigns IGFs [insulin like growth factor] as central regulators of cell profileration, survival, and organism growth " and reduces the influence of insulin to the "level of regulation fuel utilization, storage, and energy expenditure" is too simplistic to to accomm