SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Training till you drop? Well with some ATP 30 minutes before your workout it may take a couple of minutes / workout sessions more to "drop" ;-) If you drive a Porsche that runs on super you would not put crude oil in the tank, would you? Well, why do you eat carbohydrates and fats then, when ATP, i.e. adenosine triphosphate, is the "fundamental energy unit" in our bodies? Why don't we guzzle ATP all day to run with the speed of light and lift with the force of an elephant? When? Well before, during and after a workout - sounds right, hah? Ok, ok, we are not "meant" to do so, I know... but even if you managed to keep the "paleo logic" out of the equation for once, there would be another stumbling block. Oral ATP is - supposedly - not bioavailable, at least that's what many people think. "ATP supplements are not orally bioavailable." In fact, Arts et al. even used the words in the subheading of this paragraph as the title...

Lemon Juice, Resistant Starch, Coffee, Blueberries, Chili, Ginseng, Ginger, Mate, Gymnema Sylvestre, Bitter Melon - they are all in this fourth serving of the insulin sensitizing supplements series and they are all in this collage. Can you identify all of them? First of all, let me thank you for flooding me with good suggestions for supplements that should be discussed in this last installment of the series . It's Friday now that I start writing this post and it is probably going to be Sunday, before I find the time to finish the last of your suggestions; and that despite the fact that I am going to try to cut the infos short when I can foresee that it is not worth going into more details, anyway. Not worth going into details? Yep, one of the supps, where this is clearly the case was suggested by Colby who wants me to address sodium-R-lipoic acid , which is nothing else but R-ALA and in my mind a scientifically unsupported spin-off of ALA that may in fact be inferior to the r...

If we discard the common horror stories (scientists call them "case reports" ;-) about drug abuse, the stage of the Olympia is mostly "uncharted territory" - at least from a scientific perspective. It's the Olympia Weekend and thus time for a special... at least that's what I thought, when I just sat down in front of the computer a couple of minutes ago. The only problem is that boydbuilding is "scientific no-man's-land". If we forget about the formidable paper by Dr. Lindy Rossow that was finally officially published a couple of weeks ago (you can read my write-up of the ahead of print version here ). In an interview I recently did with her (not to be published here at the SuppVersity, sorry), Lindy told me that she feels that the lack of reliable information was a problem especially in view of the "vast world of 'bro-science' on the Internet" that generates a "world of misinformation and rumors" while the ...

On Taurine? If she was, she could run another marathon 6h later ;-) Actually, the results a group of researchers report in a recent paper in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness are a bit surprising. After all, taurine is - as you all should know by now - a GABA agonist and should thus rather have had a calming effect on the mice, the scientists used in their experiment. What Yumiko Takahashi, Eiki Urushibata and Hideo Hatta from the Department of Sports Sciences at the University of Tokyo observed when they supplied their lab animals with 0.5 mg/g body weight immediately after they had them run on a treadmill at 25m/min for 90 min was yet quite the opposite of the laziness you would expect after having read about the calming and balancing effects of taurine Mure et al. (2003) observed, when they administered it either alone or in conjunction with caffeine ( read pervious SuppVersity article ). Mice on taurine run more, because they can!? Contrary to the s...

Despite the fact that candy is per definition (literally) made of sugar, you can buy "no carb candy" at every corner. The results of this study tell you why these aren't worth the money. I have written extensively about artificial sweeteners in the past and would thus hope that it's not necessary to recount all the information about how they interact with insulin, potential toxicity risks, their (non-existent) effects on satiety... ah, well actually I do want to talk about the last point, because it is highly relevant to understand the implications of the results of recent Yale study (Tellez. 2013). I know, it's just a rodent study, but I guess you will feel reminded of yourselves during your diet, when I tell you about the observations Luis A Tellez, Xueying Ren, Wenfei Han, Sara Medina, Jozelia Ferreira, Catherine Yeckel and Ivan E de Araujo made an experiment that is the first to demonstrate that the lack of glucose utilization in the brain makes artifi...

Start early and don't stop before you drop. If physical activity is a part of your life from the womb to the grave, you won't have to worry about whether cardio makes you hungry. Friends of the SuppVersity will recognize this question as a recurring motif: "Does exercise really make you hungry?" An in case you are, you will also know that you have to blame Gary Taubes who seems in all honesty to believe that you would be able to cheat diabesity by simply leaving out the "bad calories" (=carbohydrates) for previous SuppVersity articles such as " HIT the Cravings, Eat Less and Improve Your Health ", " Every Dog Has It's Day - Dr. Oz Was Right, Exercise Does NOT Just Make You Hungry " or Facebook News like this . In the end, Gary is also to blame for today's SuppVersity news, or at least the fact that I jumped right at the results of a recent study from the University of Copenhagen (Rosenkilde. 2013) So does it make you ...