SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

If you are an athlete, let's say a competitive rower who trains 3+h per day, it appears as if 400IU of vitamin E would be nothing, but beneficial. If you are a couch potato, though, even that may hamper the small hormetic response you get from taking the stairs once a week ;-) I don't know if you do remember, but it is actually not all too long ago that vitamin E was what vitamin D is known: The highly celebrated non-pharmacological savior of the ailing human race. Cancer? Heart disease? Diabetes? Alpha-tocopherol, which proved to be the most potent anti-oxidant in the tocopherol family, would solve all your problems and with its ability to "scavenge" the bad "free radicals" (sounds like a story from the Brother's Grimm, doesn't it?) it would also prolong your life expectancy. After all, those mischievous reactive oxygen species were the primary drivers of the aging process... well, today we know better. Supplemental vitamin E alone does neither

Image 1: While the study at hand clearly shows that HIIT, even done on an empty stomach, is anabolic, not catabolic, it appears as if women respond better to sprint exercises than men. And this assumption is not based on gene-assays but dates back to the results of a 1999 study by Esbjörnsson which showed a more pronounced CSA increase in the leg muscles of female subjects. Not all too long ago, the general accepted consensus was that anyone whose main interest is in building muscle must abstain from any strenuous cardiovascular exercise... running on a treadmill? God-forbid! You could lose muscle. Over the last two years or so, this paradigm has began to totter, though. And now, at the beginning of 2012 I would estimate that the number of (recognized) trainers and trainees who recommend doing high intensity interval training (HIIT), if not for general conditioning, then at least as a means to shed fat, initially surpasses the number of the conventionalists who maintain that "

Image 1: Arnold obviously is flabbergast that neither of the factors mentioned in the title of this blogpost was necessary to build the impressive physique of the Arnold statue which now stands in front of the Schwarzenegger Museum . I don't know if some of you have seen it, but on January 3, 2012, ScienceDaily published a brief news-item titled " How work tells muscles to grow ". It relates to a recent study by Guerci et al. who have found that the so-called serum response factor, which basically another "gene switch", is responsible, or I should say required for exercise induced satellite-cell mediated hypertrophy ( Guerci. 2012 ). If you have been following all of the past installments of the Intermittent Thoughts from the early "Hypertrophy 101" ( Part 1 , Part 2 ), in which I explained the difference between the increase in myonuclear domain sizes as a consequence of increased protein synthesis, on the one hand and the formation of new myonu

Image 1: If you plan to eat the stuff on the plate behind the coffee cup, I guess it does not really matter if you use sugar, fructose, Aspartame, Acesulfam K, Sucralose or everybody's  new darling, stevia to sweeten the coffee ;-) If there was a yearly top 10 list of the furiously and most passionately debated topics, in the health & fitness community, the issue of "artificial sweeteners" (personally I would include high fructose corn syrup as "artificial", but I guess the FDA or rather their financiers think otherwise) would probably make it to the TOP 5 every year. All concerns about toxicity issues aside, the two main concerns people are worrying about are a direct negative effect on glucose metabolism and an indirect intake on subsequent / concurrent food intake . Both would obviously predispose consumers who buy respective products because they trust in the industry's promise that they would help the lose weight and/or ward off diabetes to th

Image 1: If you are still putting your Happy Meal on a scale, you should not wonder why your weight loss falls short of your "calculations" - especially if you happen to be a woman (img. elementsofwellness.com) While I would hope that most of you have by now embraced the notion that a calorie is not a calorie (at least, when it comes to nutritional calories), I suspect that one or two of you have still just been reviewing how much "calories" they have already eaten, or how much "cardio" they will have to do to compensate for the piece of pizza they are going to eat tomorrow at a friends party... > "STOP!" < this is what you should tell yourselves whenever thoughts like that are passing your mind (well, unless you are in the end-stage of your prep for a bodybuilding contest, I guess ;-) After all, a very recent study that is based on the results of two large-scale weight-interventions ( Heymsfield. 2012 ), i.e. the CALERIE study, condu

Image 1: Adelfo's trip to Vegas did not end up just as bad, but it still had some CSI-ish elements ;-) Assuming that many of you have already been waiting eagerly to hear, or I should say, read if and how Adelfo has survived his trip to Vegas, I guess it would be best if I put you out of misery right away, but before I let Adelfo tell you his Hollywood-style story, I want to mention that in Adelfo and myself are going to be on Carl Lanore's Super Human Radio in about 2h, i.e. 7pm EST! So, in case you are reading this in time, make sure to tune in live ( update : for everyone who missed the live show, click here to download the podcast )! But enough cross-marketing for now, let's hear what our common friend has gone through in gambler's paradise... "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" If you’ve ever seen the movie, that’s pretty much how I you could sum up the events in Vegas. As wild, and fun as it was, it also got pretty ugly towards the end. Someone b

Image 1: I guess the feed of those boars does not contain any corn oil and is spiked with both bisphenol A and soy bean extract - I mean, how else could you possibly explain those balls? (img dirtybutton.com) Let me start today's post with a few questions: Would you buy a 100% natural product that can lower your estrogen levels by up to -98% , increase the weight of your testes by ~30% and, above all, boost your testosterone levels by a whopping +87% ? I guess, at least all those of you who either have not read or not understood the Intermittent Thoughts episode on estrogen's role in skeletal muscle hypertrophy are just sitting there, nodding their heads... I would yet also venture the guess that this nodding will end pretty abruptly, now that I am about to tell you that this all natural testosterone booster is derived from the powder of 2kg of Glycine max soy beans via methanol extraction, subsequently freeze dried and capped into 600mg caps of which the av