SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

You better watch your treat-intake, if you want to wear this "costume" another year ;-) I know you probably expected "healthy Halloween recipes" in this special, but you know that this is not exactly my area of expertise. Ok, ok... Honestly, Halloween per se is not exactly my specialty either. Despite the desperate efforts of the industry to import your not so holy holiday festivities to Germany, the whole idea of dressing up like monsters, vampires, zombies and skeletons to avoid being recognized when you get drunk and laid is something we do in February, in the carneval season, not the night before All Hallow's day. In view of the fact that the majority of you are from the US or the UK and thus probably just trying to squeeze their astral bodies into last year's Halloween costume, I thought it may still be worth to compile a couple of more or less random pieces of "Halloween research". So, here you go: A Playstation is as welcome as a b...

The meager increase in glucose disposal observed in the study at hand is not likely to do anything, but be good for another confusing graph on the label of the licensees' first OpunDia powered supplements. Against the background that insulin still has a pretty bad rep, it is actually quite funny that its fiercest enemies and most loyal followers of low-carb diets are usually the guys and girls who spent tons of money on 100% useless "insulin mimetics". Insulin mimetics like the cactus extract that's at the heart of a recent study by Louise Deldicque, Karen Van Proeyen, Monique Ramaekers, Ivo Pischel, Hartwig Sievers and Peter Hespel? Or could it be possible that Opuntia Ficus-Indica is the infamous exception that proves the rule? To answer this question, it is obviously necessary that we take a closer look at the corresponding paper in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) . I mean, it is not impossible that this is finally the ...

Either you buy one of the bazillion OTC test-boosters that will not do anything for your testosterone levels, but may have minimal effects on your libido; or, you get a script for the blue pills and accept that one of the side-effects of these proven libido-boosters is an increase in testicular testosterone production. If you were all Germans, I would probably be cracking a joke about the lead author's name "Spitzer", but in view of the fact that you aren't and that it would be a saucy one I will stick to the news-piece alone - it's saucy enough, anyways ;-) Actually you've heard Carl and me talk about the purported testosterone boosting effects of sildenafil aka Viagra on the Science Round Up in the past, but Mr. Spitzer and his colleagues from the Greenfield Health Center are the first to prove the potency of the testosterone response in male subjects who received "an optimized dose" (more on that later) of sildenafil, as well as its ...

Does a flavanol in " real chocolate" help you shed the fat and build the muscle? If you are like me, you are probably already using cacao to build muscle. Whether the effects of the occasional dark chocolate bar are so profound that you'd notice if you'd skip them, is however questionable. Irrespective of the latest results from Gabriela Gutierrez-Salmean and her colleagues from the University of California , VA San Diego Health Care Systems and the Escuela Superior de Medicina del Instituto Politécnico Nacional at the Seccion de Posgrado in Mexico City present in a soon-to-be-published paper in the The Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry (Gutierrez-Salmean. 2013), by the way. "Epi" as in "Epistane" (*) was yesterday... ... "epi" as in chocolate epicatechin is the future (* Epistane was the brand name of a "pro-steroid"). This could be the take home message of future follow up studies in human beings, if the r...

We know just one thing about breakfast: Everyone believes it was good for you :-) Let me first point out that large parts of this article are based on ideas from recently published paper by Brown, Brown and Allison who wrote about the unwarranted and deep rooted believe that skipping breakfast was the first step on the royal road to obesity in a recent issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (Brown. 2013). Their hypothesis that the conviction that breakfast is the most important meal of the day was so strong that the analyses of experimental and epidemiological data will always fall in line with the (subconsciously) expected outcome, is so appealing that I do not want to deny you this information. Now, aside from the fact that I know that some of you are not willing to spend the time to read the full-text of the paper, I would not even be allowed to put it up for you to download it. In view of the fact that I also feel that I have one or another thing to add to the di...

Human study shows: Antioxidant supplements hamper "gains" in elderly individuals, as well. The effects appears to be less pronounced than in younger trainees, though. Most of you will be aware that I have been following and at least in parts subscribing to the hormesis hypothesis as it was proposed by Ristow and Zarse who proposed in 2010, already, that the mitohormesis hypothesis would provide "a common mechanistic denominator for the physiological effects of physical exercise" (Ristow. 2010). If we subscribe to the fundamental principles of this theory, any exogenous manipulation of the exercise induced stress would be expected to block or at least reduce the beneficial effects of exercise - and guess what!? Ristow et al. have already shown that ( learn more about hormesis ). The previous research By then, Ristow, Zarse, Oberbach et al. had already gotten quite some public attention, when they published the results of an experiment that involved 19 prevous...

If you do it on purpose, "hacking" your biological clock can be highly beneficial. If you're doing it out of pure ignorance, though, you're in trouble. In view of the impeding return to standard time, it's probably a good thing, in view of the iPhones, iPads and Facebooks of this world it could turn out to be a serious health problem, though: the ease with which you can "hack" your biological clock - on purpose, but also incidentally. How easy it really is to turn the biological clock of life forward and backward has in fact only recently  been confirmed by Seong Jae  Kim and colleagues from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the Technology Evaluation Center of BlueCross BlueShield Association (Kim. 2013) Fast forward / backward, please! All the scientists had to do to make sure that the 29 healthy young (25.1 ± 4.1 years, M:F=8:21) and 16 healthy older subjects (66.5 ± 6.0 years, M:F=5:11) who participated in the sa...

Note: Adel and Adelfo are not one and the same person. Adel is the guy behind the SuppVersity. Adelfo Cerame is the wheelchair BB who has documented his past contest preps here. My Progress and back development this off-season Author: Adelfo Cerame Jr., Wheelchair Pro Bodybuilder I’m Back! "I", that's me, Adelfo Cerame and "back" means - at least for now "Just for today…" but who knows what the future has in stock for us ;-) I know it’s been a while but I’ve just been really busy nowadays and to be honest it’s just been really tough to come up with new topics to talk about nowadays so I figure I would give my SuppVersity following an update on my off season progress as well as training and diet.  Training: This is how I train I’ve kept my training regimen pretty simple, focusing on compound lifts (for me that would be just your bench press and seated row), and accessory work to help me improve my main lifts, so nothing too fancy or muc...