SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Image 1: For the SuppVersity Super-Student Duong Nguyen , training in the semi-fasted state worked wonders. Want to know more? Read his guest-post and visit his blog . This is post #713 and another premier. It's the first time that I have to go back (at least partly) on something I posted three weeks ago in a post about the myth that well-stocked muscle glycogen stores would be necessary to induce an anabolic growth response in skeletal muscle. Those of you who read the respective blogpost probably remember that I had to rely on the little information there was in a short abstract that had been published in the program of the 2011 ISSN conference, because a full paper with all the information on the study had (and still has) not been published. Now, three weeks and a long and interesting email-correspondence with the author, Donny Camera from the RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, later, I have to admit that (my interpretation of) the abstract was not comp...

Image 1: The magic ingredient is in the root not in the commonly eaten leaves of "bok choy". Chances that you will find a "whole" (including the root) chinese cabbage" (lat. brassica rapa ) at your local supermarket, are yet very low... but wouldn't this be a good reason to start gardening really "whole" foods in your backyard? (img. Wikigardener ) If you are a student of the SuppVersity, you are probably already annoyed by my favorite slogan " Nature knows best! " Nevertheless, I will not tire to repeat that " eating your way to a leaner and healthier you " is probably the only sustainable alternative on a side-effect ridden life on drugs such as Xenical. As Trisha Gura points out in a newsitem on sciencemag.com , [t]he current trio of [weight loss] drugs on the market, endocrinologists say, is, at best, weak and, at worst, plagued by side effects. Hoffmann-La Roche's Xenical, for instance,...

Illustration 1: There is a bunch of things that could potentially go wrong with creatine uptake: The creatine from dietary sources could be mal-absorbed (1) in the small intestine, (2) not make it into the cell, or (3) be excreted too readily either before or immediately after it was transported into the muscle. Question from Learner (via comments): Do Creatine Transporters behave the same as glucose transporters? (I.e., serum insulin binds to cellular insulin receptors, which causes Transporters to migrate from inside the cell to the plasma membrane - and the Transporters then pull in the external glucose.) Answer Dr. Andro: As you may have noticed, I took the freedom to set Learner's question into a broader context. A context I broached in my dissertations on Athletic Edge Nutrition's new creatine product Creatine RT on Tuesday, Aug 16, 2011. Thus, the questions I will be trying to answer (unfortunately, I have to rely on existing studies and do not have m...

Illustration 1: There is a bunch of things that could potentially go wrong with creatine uptake: The creatine from dietary sources could be mal-absorbed (1) in the small intestine, (2) not make it into the cell, or (3) be excreted too readily either before or immediately after it was transported into the muscle. Question from Lerner (via comments): Do Creatine Transporters behave the same as glucose transporters? (I.e., serum insulin binds to cellular insulin receptors, which causes Transporters to migrate from inside the cell to the plasma membrane - and the Transporters then pull in the external glucose.) Answer Dr. Andro: As you may have noticed, I took the freedom to set Learner's question into a broader context. A context I broached in my dissertations on Athletic Edge Nutrition's new creatine product Creatine RT on Tuesday, Aug 16, 2011. Thus, the questions I will be trying to answer (unfortunately, I have to rely on existing studies and do not have my...

Image 1: Training for the peak, could it be possible, after all? (image from provitamin.in ) You probably have read my repeated notes on the issue of training individual muscles fibers in complete isolation in the 7-part SuppVersity EMG-Series . I guess in view of the results of a very recent study from the Faculty of Sports Sciences at the Waseda University in Japan ( Wakahara. 2011 ), it might be that I will have to revise my statement. It could in fact be that you can train a specific part of a muscle fiber - if not individually, then at least predominantly. Despite the fact that our movements are always orchestrated by the interplay of a whole host of muscle-groups and -fibers, Wakahara et al.'s results suggest that it may even be possible to target specific parts of individual fibers by selecting the correct exercises . In other words, instead of doing incline bench presses for the upper chest, you could, as many trainers recommend it for years do them with a narro...

Image 1:  I don't think celebrities realize it, but there is more to anti-aging than an unlined face. New studies show that DHEA could after all help with all sorts of age related diseases (img. antiagingpossible.com ) It's been a while since DHEA was in the news. While I have posted a handfull of mostly beneficial findings related to dehydroepitestosterone (DHEA), the hype that sourrounded its purported anti-aging effect in the late 1990s has completely abated. In view of DHEA's implication  (or rather the lack of the latter) in age-related autoimmune disease, sexual disfunction, osteoporisis, deteroiations of lipid metabolism, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular and liver disease (Basci. 2007- ignificance of  dehydroepiandrosterone  and  dehydroepiandrosterone  sulfate  in  different  diseases), it is questionable how people beyond the age of 40, when DHEA production declines by 2% per year...

Image 1: Haile Gebrselassie, probably the greatest distance runner in history, set 27 world records; is his sort stature a result of too much "cardio" (image by Alexxx86 ) Did you ever wonder if Haile Gebrselassie (image 1) is such a great long distance runner, because he is only 5'5" (1.65m, imdb )? Well, after all it could turn out that is is just the other way around - Haile could be only 5'5", because he is a great runner! Rumors have it Gebrselassie ran to school every day as a boy... what? You do not see a relation here, well then you should have a look at the data of a recent rodent study from the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil ( Campos-Ferraz. 2011 ). For 5 weeks, Patricia Lopez de Campos-Ferraz and her colleagues, put 32 male Wistar rats (21 days old) on one of four experimental protocols: 45mg/kg BCAA  + swimming - Sup/Ex Standard chow + swimming - Ctrl/Ex 45mg/kg BCAA + sedentary - Sup...