SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Apples are more likely to be insulin resistant than pears... no, we are not talking about the fruits and neither about their effects on insulin resistance, but rather about the areas where you carry most of your body fat. If it's on the buttocks and thighs, your risk of being insulin resistant is much lower than if the lion's share of your passive energy store resides right on your abs. If you've read the headline of today's SuppVersity article you are already in the know what this is going to be all about. I am yet not sure, whether you actually understand why doing a study like this makes sense... don't worry if you don't I have to admit I had to thing about it for quite some time, until looking at the various measures until it dawned on me that the main advantage is - you guessed it - of monetary nature! I mean, if you could tell simply by looking at the standard labtests, most of which do include both triglycerides and HDL levels, you could save a lot...

The typical soccer player is no longer a stick on muscular legs, these days. The sport has changed and so have the physiques of the players. I guess ever since I published the article "The Glucose Repartioning Effects of Isoleucine: Falsely Underappreciated BCAA and Its Dipeptides Maximize GLUT-4 Expression and Ramp Up Muscular Glucose Uptake" ( read it ) that discussed the beneficial effect of the small isoleucine peptides in hydrolized whey on glucose metabolism, some of you may have been wondering, whether theh previously sneered at even more insulinogenic fast-digesting, bad-tasting, highly-processed whey protein hydrolysates (WPHs) may not be an alternative, if not the better alternative to whey concentrates or isolates. Personally, I have always favored the "whole" over its individual parts, but the evidence that there is something special about WPH is accumulating. "So what kind of new evidence is accumulating here? " That being said, the...

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde - Is HMB have another janus-faced supplement ? I know "mice are no little men", ... I don't have to be reminded of that. Thank you. So, if you are not interested in today's SuppVersity article, just come back tomorrow for another article without our hairy friends in it... You are still here? Ok, then let's see what the researchers at the Florida State University have to tell us about the effects of HMB supplementation on trained vs.  overtrained and energy deprived rodents. Even though, the significance of the results for mammals with less body hair such as human beings is not clear, we may still expect similar trends, yet not identical numbers on the weight, muscle and fat loss, as well as parameters that were assessed in the study at hand. Some details on the experimental protocol The scientists started out with a total of 61 animals that were initially divided into three groups. The animals in the groups were either sedentary...

This describes the problem quite perfectly. You would never eat rancid fish - trust me, if you did it would take the same way out, it went in. Try the same with rancid fish oil caps and you will at best suffer from burping. Could be a sign your some of the "real fish" that stinks and warns you that a fish is rancid is still left in your oil, but I don't have a study to prove that. Carl mentioned it on the Science Round-Up , but we did not really get to it, so I thought it would make a nice headliner for the weekend. A headliner, of which I have already pointed out that I doubt it will be responsible for the prostate cancer issues with fish oil (see Thursday's news ). It does, allegedly, sound logical that the consumption of oxidized (=rancid) fish oil would precipitate the development of cancer, but it is not logical why this would happen in the prostate, yet nowhere else. On the other hand, rancidity could, as this recent study from the  Miguel Hernandez Univer...

Body fat: If you store it, store it here or a couple of centimeters below. To avoid metabolic disease and premature death. 580% that's the SuppVersity Figure of the Week and the increase in diabetes risk you will have if your trunk to leg fat ratio is in the top quartile . In view of the fact that this goes hand in hand with a +290% increased risk for high triglycerides, a +80 increased risk of high blood pressure, as well as 3x higher hances to suffer from low HDL levels and 3.6x higher risk of developing metabolic syndrome, these figures from a study that was recently conducted at the University of California Berkeley-University of California San Francisco (Wilson. 2013), will be more than just the figure(s) of the week. They are also the topic of this article.. Trunk to leg fat ratio emerges as the new marker of metabolic health  (Wilson. 2013) The actual intention of the study Joseph P. Wilson et al. conducted was to find a new and reliable anthropometric marker f...

Did the media hype surrounding the "Fish Oil Promotes Prostate Cancer" break this poor critter's neck? I guess you will all have listened to the Science Round-Up live, right? No? Well then I'd suggest you do that now , because I am not going to waste any more time on the breakfast or sweetener study, but felt inclined to take another look at the fish / fish oil and prostate cancer issue. Why? Well, I have written tons about breakfast ( read it ), the circadian rhythm ( read it ) and by good way too much about sweeteners ( look here ) in the past to reiterate that in the absence of any new scientific evidence whatsoever. "Fish oil promotes prostate cancer! What shall we do?" While I am not sure that someone actually wrote that, it is only natural for the layman to assume that taking fish oil capsules and even eating fish would be detrimental to his prostate health, once he is confronted with scientific evidence not just from one study, but actuall...

Are short rest periods overtly exhausting and will reduce your training volume and compromise the beneficial effects of your workouts? It sounds completely logical. If you rest less you cannot move as much weight, because you will feel jaded due to the "insuffient" rest (I wonder who defines what "insufficient" is...?). Scientists from the University of Rio de Janeiro have now put this cornerstone of conventional training wisdom to the test and found that things are - once again - not as easy as it would seem. To this ends, the researchers recruited 16 young trained subjects with at least 1 year of previous training experience and tested the effect 5 different rest protocols would have on the total volume of otherwise identical workouts. Short vs. long, progressive vs. constant and fixed intervals Now, instead of telling their subjects to simply rest one minute or three, the researchers had them train the same bench press and triceps extension protocol w...

Embrace,... ah pardon, I meant brace your abs! Brace your abs and make the six packs shine through. It's summertime and thus the time of the year, when men all over the world suddenly realize that there is something missing right between their well-shaven chest and the elastic waist of their shorts. In fact, for the majority of these "poor wretches" (aka perfectly normal men), there is rather "something too much" than something missing and I should point out in advance that the following blogpost is not going to help you to solve that problem, in order not to raise false hopes: Bracing yourself is not going to help you lose body fat. What "bracing yourself" or rather your abs can do for you, though is to help you strengthen your core, wherever you go, stand or train. "How's that and what exactly is abdominal bracing?" Now that I have gotten your full attention, it is probably about time to explain what exactly abdominal bracing is...

The mere fact that probiotics can ameliorate some of the damage that's done by the way people eat this day, does not imply that they are the origin of the obesity epidemic; and the study at hand shows: They are not the solution either. A recently published study from the Key Laboratory of Dairy Biotechnology and Engineering at the Inner Mongolia Agricultural University could hold a "solution" - or rather a way to ameliorate the damage that comes with the overconsumption of fructose. Cause or solution!? I don't care if it works! Based on previous observations the researchers speculated that the provision of  10,000,000,000 CFU/day Lactobacilli Casei Zhang bacteria  to male Sprague Dawley rats who were guzzling "rodent coke", i.e. 25 % fructose water, 24/7 for either 9 weeks after the supplementation was initiated, or 4 weeks after 9 weeks on fructose water would ameliorate the weight negative side effects of the addition of fructose to an alrea...