SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Image 1 (NYC Dept. of Health & Mental Hygiene): The words on this poster from a 2009 campaign in the NY subway must be taken literally! There is a reason for me to always begin my "dietary advice" with the statement "there is NO WAY that you ever again drink any soft, energy drinks or fruit juices on a daily basis". And though I would not have needed a study to confirm skipping, lemonade, coke & co is one of the simplest, for many people yet not easiest steps to a healthier and leaner physique, I must admit that I was pretty surprised how rapid both your health and body composition deteriorate, once you reintroduce this junk into your diet. +1kg of pure body fat in 4 weeks, that was the amount of weight the 11 healthy men and women in a recently published study by scientists from the UK, Italy and the US gained within just 4 weeks in the course of which they drank on average two more or less tasty Lucozade Energy drinks per day (Sartor. 2012). Fat co...

Image 1: If you infused your ice-water with an extract of those, that could supercharge your "cold thermogensis" (see " Ephedra vs. Cold Thermogensis " ;-) Those last 1-2lbs of stubborn fat have been and still are the focal point of countless of discussions among trainees, trainers and  magazines even average Joes and Janes who would not even remotely consider to go to the gym to get rid of those love handles - interestingly, all these groups are similarly susceptible to one message: "Revolutionary breakthrough in topical fat loss: " Whatever-Our-Marketing-Department-Came-Up-With- Burn will obliterate the stubborn body fat that's still covering your abs, obliges, butt, and whatever else you hate about yourself in record time!" Sounds and, as the countless disappointed testimonies on the Internet confirm, is usually too good to be true. How many scoville (SHU) does it take to burn 1lbs of body fat? A soon to be published study by researche...

Video 1 ( click to play ): Adelfo Cerame Jr, at the Wheelchair Championships 2012; posedown for the overall I guess most of you will have heard it already. Adelfo won the title at the Wheelchair Nationals (I had expected nothing else), but came off second best - at least in the eyes of the judging panel - in the posedown for the Overall (see video 1 ). Allegedly, this was not the best Adelfo we have seen. And as he is going to point out in today's SuppVersity post, 4-days before, he looked so much better that I am pretty sure that he would have taken that pro-card home, if... well, I will let him tell you the story, but before I do so, let me say this: I am proud of you Adelfo ! Even more now (after reading this post), than before. You have everything it takes to be a pro, don't care about that sheet of paper you will pick it up somewhere along your way! Learning From my mistakes and moving on & forward As much as I was disappointed in losing the overalls, I was mo...

Image 1 (IndiaToday): If you insist on ingesting 3x cans (=sugar equivalent of the maltodextrin supplement in the study at hand) of a not-to-be-named energy drink during your workouts and don't die from caffeine poisoning, you may gain more, but I suspect not in those areas, where you ant it ;-) Whether you should or should not supplement with carbohydrates is a matter of constant debate among strength trainees. While some swear that they cannot perform if they aren’t guzzling a glucose-laden “intra-workout” supplement or energy drink from the supermarket, others prefer to get the lion's share of their carbs from whole foods, settle for BCAAs or plain water as their workout beverage of choice and wash down a sweet ripe banana with a tasty protein shake after their workouts. And while a previous paper by Bird et al. suggested that the former practice, i.e. the ingestion of a carbohydrate supplement (6%, preferably with 6g of EAAs) during your workouts, could significantly bl...

Video 1 (GSSI): Notre Dame 's Michael Floyd goes all out on the Wingate test ( click to watch ) I guess you could say that these are the "classic days", here at the SuppVersity , contrary to my previous post on choline , which is - judged by the few people who still use it today, an "old school supplement" (cf. " Choline: Stronger, Faster, Leaner & More Muscular, or Just Another Dumb-and-Barbell Story? ") - yesterday's post on caffeine highlighted the efficacy of a potent ergogenic aid and metabolic activator, with the effects of which most of us are so familiar that we are alway tempted to turn to useless crap like raspberry ketones , when what we are already doing is not only tried and proven, but based on respectable scientific data even more effective than the latest "innovation" from the snake oil industry. And let's be honest, haven't we all been tempted by one or another "new creatine", as well? +11% pe...

Image 1: If I had the choice to have a tasty cup of coffee with the beautiful young lady or a couple of overpriced  raspberry ketone caps with Dr. Oz, I would not even need scientific studies to make my choice ;-) I am a huge fan of innovation, but when the name of the innovation begins with “raspberry” and ends on “ketones”, is pimped by TV doctors and sold on the 24h shopping channels, I can do well without it and better drink another cup of coffee and eat a couple of lycopene-laden tomatoes, whenever I feel the need to prevent hepatic steatosis on an obesogenic diet. I know this may not be as hip as investing 30-50 bucks in an underdosed “scientifically proven” (by exactly two dubious rodent trials, i.e. Miromoto. 2005, Wang. 2012) raspberry ketone supplement, but, on the other hand, it is also half as stupid and probably at least as efficient (Bahcecioglu. 2010; Vitaglione. 2010; Birerdinc. 2011; Molloy. 2011). And what's more, picking cafeine over raspberry ketones would...

Image 1: Itadori ( Japanese Knotweed ) and selected varieties of red wine are the best yet vastly 'underdosed' sources of resveratrol (see red box, below) At least in rodents, resveratrol, the red-wine polyphenol, has been shown to act as an exercise mimetic, exerting profound effects on PGC-alpha expression which protect muscle from wasting due to mechanical unloading (also know as extreme couch-potato-ing ;-) and rodents from the negative side-effects of obesogenic diets by directly modulation gene expression, lipid transport and fatty acid oxidation in skeletal muscle (Chen. 2011; Momken. 2011). Still, most of the oftentimes publicly puffed up data on resveratrol comes from in-vitro studies with dosages of which even the researchers often believe that they are not attainable via oral supplementation. Rodents or petri dishes? Humans would be too expensive... Compared with the aformentioned in vitro data, the numbers and gene essays in a recently published study by s...

Image 1: Losing consciousness is very different from losing body fat and while the former may require "burning" more than 800kcal, the latter does not. Sometimes you read an abstract like that by Mahmoud Hesar Koushki et al. and think "Hmm... that sucks!" Then, you come to think about it and realize "Yeah! That really sucks!" And the thing that sucks in this particular case is the message studies like that are sending out to the public, when they end on statements like " Rising the energy costs of the exercise through increasing the exercise duration, can be one of the factors affecting negative energy balance, leading to positive changes in leptin concentrations. " (Hesar Koushki. 2012). What's good for your obese neighbor... ... must not be good for you! I know, I am repeating myself here, but in view of the fact that my voice obviously has not been heard in Iran, as of yet, I will repeat my novel mantra as often as it takes for pe...