SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Image 1: It is unlikey that you would not benefit from sodium bicarbonate supplementation,... well, unless you are a tinman like The Sprinter by Jessy Meyer ;-) "Our daily baking soda give us today" , ... just in case you are now shaking your head asking yourselves, whether I have a major contract with any sodium bicarbonate manufacturer, let me get this straight: I have not! But the white powder with the salty taste (it is not 1/2, not even 1/10 as bad as sodium-chloride = table salt) is simply an amazing(-ly cheap) and way underrated ergogenic. Whether this is due to the fact that you can hardly squeeze money out of gullible customers (and non- SuppVersity readers ;-) like you can with the "next creatine" of which you have sprinkled an insignificant amount into your latest and greatest proproprietary blend, or whether it is simply the potential of gastrointestinal side effects is anyone's guess, though... "Subjects were began the training [...]&qu

Image 1: Even if you kill him, he will take revenge and increase your blood glucose and triglyceride levels. And if you don't die from the negative side effects of the oil from his liver the neurotoxins from his fins will take care of the rest (cf. Science Daily ) "Healthy fats" ... not to long ago even the combination of these two words was an oxymoron (an intrinsic contradiction). "How on earth can fats be healthy?" Was what the blank stares were telling you, when you set out to explain how and why people should not buy the latest and greatest "no fat" products from their local grocery stores. As of late the tides have changed and even mainstream media is jumping on the "healthy fats"-bandwagon - unfortunately, in a similarly single-sided way as before, with the "healthy polyunsaturated fats" on the one side of the divide and the "unhealthy saturated fats" on the other. Now, we all know that this distinction is f

Image 1: This is what NO boosters promise, yet mostly don't deliver. Many people believe that there is some truth to every myth. And in fact, a recently published study rom the Department of Surgery, Biological Sciences and Human Anatomy & Cell Science (quite a mouthful) at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, shows that even there may be a quantum of truth even in the "arginine" or "nitric oxide" or "pre-workout" or "however else you may want to call it" myth, which says that getting a decent pump will help you build muscle ( Leiter. 2012 ). Now, aside from the fact that the latest generation of those pre-workout supplements boasts of having no arginine in them and relies solely on the stimulant rush the various *amines in them will produce, there is not a single study in which supplementation with X, Y, or Z amount of l-arginine (or other forms of the alpha-amino acid) had produced greater increases in skeletal muscle

Image 1: In 2009 10% of all US children had at least a mild form of asthma. 57% of these children had had at least one asthma attack in the year before. And in the year 2007, 9 people died of an asthma attack on each of the 365 days of the year ( CDC. 2007-2009 )... yet our understanding of the nutrition-cleanliness-autoimmune axis is still in its infancy while millions of dollars are spent on a non-sensical "war on cholesterol", every day.    [Note: This is a direct sequel to the last installment ] There she is, Mrs Youesdeay... you hated her. Her and her healthy greens: "Good morning my dear! I see your mommy is in a hurry today?... Good morning Mrs. Singleparent!" Mrs. Youesdeay was standing there, her usual half-anorexic vegan self, staring right into your eyes." It was as if she was saying: "Gimme those peanut-butter sandwiches my dear !" To escape this fate, you had made it a habit to hurry right past her and into the grey building with its

Image 1: A reasonable carb intake, regular exercise and, interestingly, creatine will help you not to become insulin resistant in the first place. I don't know if you remember my rant against statins being promoted as unproblematic and healthy, when, at the same time, mainstream media portray creatine as a "dangerous gateway drug to steroids" (cf. " Statins Increase Diabetes Risk by >50% "). Today's blogpost is sort of an unintended follow-up on the former. After all the "dangerous gateway drug" just turned out to be useful in the treatment of the side-effects of the allegedly life-saving HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors (=statins). A teaspoon of creatine a day keeps metformin away! In the latest issue of the journal Amino Acids Christiano Robles Rodrigues Alves and his colleagues from the School of Physical Education and Sports at the University of Sao Paulo in (guess where ;-) Sao Paulo, Brazil, present the results of a double-blind ran

Image 1: "How did I let this happen again?", asks Oprah in her own magazine (as a German I am shocked there even is such a thing as an "Oprah Magazine" ;-) - the answer is simple, Oprah! Your "diet" programmed the YoYo effect! It happened not after, but right while you were starving... ah, pardon "dieting"! From time to time, I am using the Blogspot stats to check where you , my dear readers, are coming from. Aside from the usual suspects, there are sometimes certain posts, which attract a hell lot of visitors from single threads on any of the major or minor bulletin boards. To cut a long story short, about 2 weeks ago, I hit on a forum where one of you (thank you by the way) cited the SuppVersity as a good source of information for all things related to nutrition and exercise... now, the reason I mention this, is not that without comments like this and people spreading the word, the work I put into this blog on a daily basis would hardly be

Image 1: Huge sleeping, huge eating, huge training, huge progress and a HUGE back ;-) I know this is not really the place to discuss recent studies, but in this case a study I read about three days ago fits in way too nicely into what Adelfo is going to tell you in about 30 seconds (or how long it may take you to read the next few lines) not to briefly mention it... in the latest issue of PLoS ONE a group of researchers from the University of Michigan Medical School report the results of a few rodent experiments they did ( Su. 2012 ), results, which clearly show that the over-expression of AMPK in response to acute glucose expression directly inhibits leptin signalling - or put simply, if you don't fuel your workouts appropriately / refuel afterwards, you can carry as much body fat as you want, your body will ignore its existence and thusly refuse to burn it... but enough of that for today, let's get to the more practical side of things - Adelfo, take it away! Four week

Image 1: Babies instinctively know how to grow - mother's milk (60% whey, 40% casein, at later stages) + sleep ;-) Tell me, does the sentence "Where Bro- and Pro-Science Unite in the Spirit of True Wisdom" ring a bell? Anyone? Well, that's what I thought. It's the mantra of the SuppVersity ... unfortunately, more often than not, one "science" does not really care about the other, so that studies as the one by Peter T. Res and his colleagues from the University of Maastricht are unfortunately rather the exception than the rule ( Res. 2012 ). Pre-bed protein intake could be a crucial determinant of 24h protein synthesis I guess, I won't have to tell you that bro-science has it that the most important thing to do before you go to bed (and for some hardcore "bros" even in the middle of the night) is not to brush your teeth, let alone to shower or at least wash your face, hands, feet and certain other body parts... no! The most importan

Image 1: A statin here, some metformin to keep the collateral at bay, add an ACE inhibitor and some anti-coagulant drugs and you have a delicious cocktail of highly profitable pharmaceuticals... Do you remember how creatine has gotten a bad rep within the mass media, a few years ago? Initially touted as an over-the-counter "steroid" by a clueless journalist, the did not, as you would have expected backpedal, or at least forget about the whole thing, when some experts raised their hands and said: " Wait a minute! Creatine is a naturally occuring amino acid with thousands of studies backing its efficacy... ", no, they just turned it around and said: " Look, this is how it goes: First creatine, then androstenedione, next real gear! This stuff is a starter drug which will make our youth go astray! " ... Today, or I should say, on January 9, 2012, a study on another, yet in the eyes of the press obviously way less "starter drug" has been published

Image 1: I guess many of the competitive track cyclists will be taking beta alanine either on its own, or as part of one of the thousands of proprietary blends in the squillion ergogenic supps you can chose from at your favorite supplement store. I am yet pretty sure that only very few of them have heard that a much more efficient ergogenic aid may be lying around unnoticed in their kitchen. If you had to compile a list of proven (and I am not talking about the way "proven" is used by the supplement industry!) ergogenic aids and ordered them by the number of publications, carbohydrates (all types) and protein (including BCAAs and EAAs) would be at the top of the list... from then, things get somewhat more complicated, but I would guess that creatine could actually have the potential to make it to the third place - it would by all means be within the top 5. Whether this is true for beta alanine, which probably would be the #4 on the list of an increasing number of physical