SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Everyone will know somebody who managed to build an impressive physique with meal-timing. The question you cannot answer, however, is whether that's due to the timing or rather his/her mindful eating habits, healthy food choices and overall controlled energy intake. Originally, people thought about dieting quite mechanistically. With health and fitness becoming more important than religion to many people, this has changed significantly and we've seen various trends ranging from the low-fat fad in the 1980s to the anti-fructose movement of the early 2000s and the ketogenic revival 10 years later. Eventually, the transient nature of all these trends did yet confirm one thing: the macronutrient of your diets may influence if and how much fat/muscle weight you lose or gain, but it's only one out of several parameters that determine the way(s) in which your diet will affect your health and body composition. Another factor that has been recognized to do just that is nutrien...

First fat, then carbs and now protein? Are we ever going to stop pointing fingers at individual macronutrients and acknowledge that it's our caloric excess that's making us fat? As a SuppVersity reader the notion that the BCAA levels of obese mammals are chronically elevated is no news for you. In fact, I've written about the potential link between BCAAs and obesity repeatedly over past decade and the findings have been astonishingly consistent: Branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs; leucine, isoleucine, and valine) are elevated in the blood of obese, insulin-resistant humans and rodents. What is not consistent, though, is the interpretation of this observation. In most previous articles I've highlighted that the "BCAA question" is - eventually - yet another of those nasty chicken-or-egg questions, where the accumulation of BCAAs in the blood could be both, a cause or consequence of metabolic disease. Learn more about amino acid and BCAA supplements at ...

None of these qualifies as "brain booster". A few years ago the results of a recent study from New Zealand would probably have made the mainstream news: A double-blind, placebo-controlled, cross-over experimental design was used. "Results revealed that ingestion of glucose and sucrose led to poorer performances on the assessed tasks as opposed to fructose and the placebo" (Ginieis 2017). These days, however, sugar is everyone's boogieman, anyway. It is thus unlikely that you will read about Rachel Ginieis paper anywhere else, but here - and that despite the fact that its results could have a profound influence on your cognitive abilities. Learn more about fructose at the SuppVersity Bad Fructose not so Bad, After All! Learn its Benefits. Fructose From Fruit is NOT the Problem Americans Don't Eat More Fructose Today An Apple A Day, Keeps... & More (Guestpost) Fructose is Not Worse Than Sugar How Much Fructose is Bad for the He...

About time for another installment of the SuppVersity Short News . Isn't it? Today: Stretching + Glycemia, Curcumin + Weight(-Re)Gain, ARA + Inflammation Have you been waiting for a new installment of the SuppVersity Short News ? Well, the waiting just ended. In today's installment, I will shed some light on the weight(re)gain-limiting effects of curcumin and their mechanistic underpinnings, (2) explain how post-prandial stretching may help you control your blood sugar surges, and (3) answer the question whether the (meanwhile hardly available) alleged muscle-building (pro-inflammatory) long-chain omega-6 fatty acid, arachidonic acid (ARA, yes that's the alleged evil twin brother to DHA and EPA), doesn't just improve the myogenic (=muscle promoting) gene response to exercise but will also ruin your health. Read about exercise- and nutrition-related studies in the SuppVersity Short News Alcohol, Microbes & International Chest Day Aug '15 Ex.Res. Upd.:...

If you're looking for the extra-kick in leg workouts, the combination of caffeine and creatine may be just what you need.  You will remember that I wrote about the results of Trexel's dissertation from 2015  and that his experimental evidence (real-world) refutes the previously postulated negative feedback of caffeine on the effect of creatine monohydrate on phosphocreatine stores (and thus logically on performance). Against that background, I question to which extent Vandenberghe et al. (36) were right, when they postulated that the interaction between caffeine and creatine can reduce the creatine supply and the pharmacokinetics, it has also IMHO not been proven that caffeine would impair protein synthesis by depleting intracellular calcium that changes the fatigue process but damages protein synthesis. In fact caffeine, there's more recent evidence from Moore et al. (2017) which shows that this is another theory-based hypothesis that cannot be observed in the re...