SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Would having your coffee with splenda instead of sugar make this cookie even more hazardous for your glucose metabolism and what about your waistline? If you've listened to yesterday's installment of the science Round-Up your are probably already in the know of the most important facts about the "pro-insulinogenic" effects of sucralose and how it is (a) neither sure what exactly is causing this increase in post-prandial insulin release, nor (b) whether this is the "bad thing" conventional wisdom would dictate it is. If you've also read the corresponding press release from the Washington University in St. Louis , I've linked in yesterday's Facebook post on the matter, you will know that even the authors of the study are not yet sure about the real world implications of their results: "The elevated insulin response could be a good thing, she pointed out, because it shows the person is able to make enough insulin to deal with spiki...

Fast or slow for eccentric biceps curls? Is that a question of faith or can science provide us with an adequate answer? "What the ****? Training slowly is for pussies! " Ok, admittedly the subjects in the study today's SuppVersity article is going to deal with were ladies (obviously no pussies), but I do not need a study, to tell you that the "pussy" training can hurt significantly more than the "bro" version that usually ends in ballistic movements that are meant to impress the male and female "pussies" at the gym and will yield astonishing increases in trap-size from "bicep curls". Now, I am digressing from the topic at hand, which is: Does it just hurt or does it also work? What? Ah, yeah... I am talking about training at a slow velocity. Eccentric training to be specific. Exactly the kind of training researchers from the ), State University of Campinas have investigated in their latest experiment (Libardi. 2013). Fast o...

In addition to the previously reported improvements in cholesterol particle profile, the regular consumption of whole eggs increases HDL's ability to carry lipids out of the macrophages. If these accumulate, they will turn the macrophage into pro-atherogenic foam cells (cf. Eckardstein. 2001). You will probably remember the long-boycotted(*) 2012 study by Blesso et al. which showed quite conclusively that daily whole egg consumption has a  beneficial impact on the HDL-C levels and the particle size profile of overweight and obese patients following a diet with a moderate amount of carbohydrates ( read all about the study in the SuppVersity article from October 2012) (*) I obviously have no evidence that the publication of the Blesso study was mischievously delayed, but it is unquestionably conspicuous that a paper with 100% convincing data that the witch hunt on eggs of the medical establishment is totally unwarranted was postponed from September 2012 (date of the online...

Whatever sleeping position you and your partner prefer, you better make sure you do get some sleep. There'll still be time for life's other pleasures, don't worry  ;-) If you are - as I would highly suggest - following the 6-12 SuppVersity Short News on Facebook , you will be aware of the accumulating evidence suggesting that a lower resistance to the inflammatory assault of exercise is at the heart of the age-induced decline in muscle gains. We all know that especially those of us, who are still in good shape in their 60s and beyond are already having a hard time to keep the status quo, and only a handful of them appears to be able to make constant progress. But is this something you just have to accept or can the latest research help you overcome or at least lower the "anabolic" resistance? And if so, could young(er) individuals benefit from the same or similar interventions? Age, inflammation, recovery and supercompensation In a soon-to-be-published ...

Wallace Spearman, US Olympic Track & Field Athlete, a sure candidate to benefit from 12-wks of resistance training in the off-season... and I bet that's what he's doing, anyways. I am preaching this day in and day out: Pick up the weight. It's not going to harm you! It's just for your own benefit. However, for whatever reason women and male athletes competing in sports where the guys they look up to don't look exactly like muscular machines are stubbornly reluctant to listen to this advice... about as stubborn, by the way, as a couple of gymbros in my surrounding, when it comes to doing a minimal amount of "cardio" (not even necessarily HIIT) to (a) keep the fat at bay, (b) maintain the overall conditioning that's necessary to train actually intense, i.e. maximal muscle stimuation vs. packing on the maximum amounts of plates and (c) ensure that they don't die from a heart failure on yet another 1-rep max attempt after having to take 15min ...

Could beta alanine "tingle down" your neuronal circuits? (img health.yahoo.com) You wouldn't be taking a dietary supplement that does not have any studies about potential side effects, would you? ... I guess, most of you will answer this question with "No, never", or "no, I wouldn't" and will thus be pretty surprised to hear that their periworkout nutrition contains an "untested", brain-active compound with a highly familiar name: Beta-Alanine! Maybe some of you may be remembering an earlier post of mine about the hypothetical side effects the popular ergogenic could on your heart (see " Beta Alanine Suffocates Cardiomyocytes "; read more ), but since I - or rather no scientists - has followed up on the notion that this widely used dietary supplement could turn out to be a wolf in sheep's clothing, even those of you who have read the respective post will probably have forgotten about it by now. Even researchers still...

85 sessions (general fitness class, three times/week, 55-60 min/session from weeks 8-10 to weeks 38-39 of pregnancy are nothing but healthy for mother + child (Barakat. 2013) Obese mothers with gestational diabetes are more than just a financial burden. That's what the SuppVersity Figures of the Week clearly indicate. According to a recently published paper from the National University of Ireland Galway woman who develop gestational diabetes during pregnancy (mostly due to pre-existing extra fat -pounds; not BMI), produce 34% higher health-care costs (Gillespie. 2013). Just as the 75% increase in the necessity to have the kids being delivered by cesarean section , this would still be tolerable, though, if their poor offspring did not also have a increased risk of being born with pathological ventricular hypertrophy (Ullmo. 2007) and a 214% higher likelihood of having to be admitted to the neonatal unit , which, in turn, is associated with "increased and/or aberrant ad...