SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Natural migraine protection: Even if supps won't cure it, they can at least reduce the number of "bad days" and the severity of the attacks. In the last installment of the " Short News " you've learned about the enormous costs chronic pain produces on an annual basis: Roughly $300 billion for its treatment and another $300 billion in form of economic damage. No wonder pain killers, Cox inhibitors and & co are among the top selling and drugs in the world. Now, migraine is unquestionably among the most debilitating forms of chronic or rather cyclic chronic pain and while women are much often hit by the pain from withing (21.8% v.s 10.0% of the US citizens suffer; NHS 2009). And while I cannot tell you how much of the $2,000 bucks each of you is "spending" on an annual base on treating the pain of his / her fellow citizens, I believe that both of you, my dear mal and female readers, may benefit from the information in today's installment...

With annual costs of $560-$635 billion chronic pain is going to bankrupt the US before the diabesity epidemic can. After all the $146 billion obesity cost the US economy in 2008 is pretty cheap compared to the ~$300 due to chronic pain, wouldn't you agree? $560-$635 billion that's the SuppVersity Figure of the Week and it quantifies the annual amount of money that is spent for treating chronic pain in the US (Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Advancing Pain Research , Care , and Education . 2011). According to the latest data (2011) each US citizen is thus paying $2,000.00 to relieve the pain of 100 million chronic pain patients in the US alone. Obviously you are not  paying those two grands to your sick neighbor, directly. In fact, the $2,000 consist of the total incremental cost of health care due to pain which ranges from $261 to $300 billion and a $297-$336 billion "penalty" due to lost productivity (that's more than 2x more than the $147 eco...

While us Westerners think of goitre mostly as a result of iodine deficiency, the Chinese have learned by hard that the opposite is about as likely - goitre in response to iodine in the drinking water is a huge health problem in certain parts of the country (Zheng. 2000) As colorful as the web may have become, it is still full of paradigmatic black-and-white thinking: The world is either black or white and if you browse the blogosphere, it would appear that iodine would certainly belong to the white part of our world. That in exactly those people who are often referred to as an example of the multitude of beneficial health effects, namely the Japanese, a high intake of iodine has repeatedly been shown to be associated with low thyroid function and even full-blown hypothyroidism, on the other hand, is something you will probably not learn from the tons of unreferenced stuff you'll find on the Internet about how good, if not essential it was for your health to take copious amounts...

Peru Ground Cherries could be among the most potent fruity anti-cancer agents nature has to offer. In all the hoopla around "anti-nutrients", people tend to forget that the majority of the hailed phenols, flavenoids etc. serve the very same purpose, they protect the fruit of certain plants. For a recent study from the School of Public Health and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Guangzhou, as well as the Peking Univerity Fang Li et al. have now compiled an extensive list of fruits, their peels, pulp and seeds and the corresponding anti-proliferative activity, you may want to use as an anti-cancer shopping guide, when you are grocery shopping... and if you do so, don't peel them: the protective peel is where nature stores most of the stuff that kills cancer cells by having them suffocate in their own reactive oxygen species! Keep in mind, while the fruits can kill cancer in the petri dish you would be asking too much if you expect to cure existing cancer by just ...

Carbs, whey and casein, is everything better than not eating before bed? As a SuppVersity reader you know for quite some time that eating carbs past 6PM is not going to make you fat ( go back and learn more ). However, what you probably don't know is what exactly happens when you have 33g of vanilla flavored maltodextrin powder right (30 min) before bed? And how does that compare to 30g of whey protein or casein? Interesting questions, right? Well, good for us that Takudzwa A. Madzima, Lynn B. Panton, Sarah K. Fretti, Amber W. Kinsey and Michael J. Ormsbee from the Department of Nutrition, Food and Exercise Sciences at the Institute of Sports Science and Medicine of the Florida State University alrady have some answers. Whey, casein or carbs before bed? The study was designed to investigate the extent to which a single serving of WP, CP, CHO or a PLA before sleep affects satiety and metabolism, independent of exercise, in eleven physically active (at least 4 d/week an...

"Now you've got me confused!" In the context of MSG scare, glutamate has gotten such a bad rep that it seems highly counterintuitive to assume that there was anything good about the major excitatory amino acid in the human body and still, a recent study from the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Waterloo clearly suggests that "MSG and carbohydrate supplementation can be used to manipulate plasma glutamate" (Sebastiano. 2013)... and no, we are not talking about an in-vitro or rodent study here. With 9 perfectly healthy, recreationally active men aged 23.9+/-1.9y and a BMI of 25kg/m² the results can however be taken as being representative for at least large parts of the ever-decreasing number of "normal-weight" individuals. There is a potential string attached Usually, the "on the other hands", are something I am talking about at the end of the article, but in this case, of which I expect that it's going to become ...

Is rice the new whey to go? Or just something for the average vegan who realizes that he cannot go without protein? While I personally considered the study on phosphatidic acid ( yesterday's news ) most interesting, there were many other presentations on the ISSN conference that are worth mentioning (note: my buddy Sean Casey is about to write a summary of his stay there, I'll let you know on Facebook , when he is done). The full-text papers are however only available for one of the studies, which has likewise been conducted by Joy et el. (see PA study). The fulltext just appeared on the website of the Nutrition Journal (Joy. 2013) and is also the topic of today's SuppVersity article that revolves - once again - around the question, whether whey really is the whey (all typos intended) to go. Is there any other way than whey? The study was conducted with 24 college-aged, resistance trained males (21.3 ± 1.9 years, 76.08 ± 5.6 kg, 177.8 ± 12.3 cm) who had trained a...