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First Study to Demonstrate Ergogenic Effects of Metformin - 14% Increased Time to Exhaustion in Standardized Supra-Maximal Cycling Test With 500mg of Ordinary Metformin

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With the publication of Learsi's latest paper the list of things metformin can do for you has just gotten been expanded with another item: Doping! You will probably remember my article about the potential, but unproven ergogenic effects of AMPK mimetics ( read it ). Well, as it is often the case, a new study is released only days after you've published a review of the existing literature. Oftentimes that's not really relevant, but in the case of the latest study from the  Federal University of Alagoas  this may be different. After all, we are dealing with a human study  in  ten healthy, physically active, but non-athletic subjects with a mean (±SD) maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max) o 38.6 ± 4.5 mL/kg per min who performed (i) an incremental test; (ii) six submaximal constant workload tests at 40%-90% V O2max; and (iii) two supramaximal tests (110% V O2max). All tests were performed twice once with a placebo supplement and once with 500mg of metformin. Both, the pl...
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ALA, Berberine, Metformin, Resveratrol, AICAR & Co - Are AMPK Mimetics & Activators Good or Bad for Athletes?

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Unless you're planning to just sit, instead of cycle on your spinning bike, it is by no means sure if your performance well benefit or maybe even suffer from the use of AMPK mimetics and activators. Recently someone asked me on Facebook, whether AMPK activators like Lipoic acid (ALA), Berberine, Metformin, AICAR & Co wouldn't make excellent performance boosters. I pondered that question for some time and said: "If you are about to compete in a highly glycolytic sport, the opposite is probably the case." There's little question that supplements like lipoic acid are useful if you are an overweight type II diabetic. But let's be honest: How many of you fall into this category? As healthy, active individuals or even athletes, on the other hand, you should be aware that the ability of these agents to increase the glucose uptake and block the glyconeogenic pathways in the liver may easily make you run out of fuel during anaerobic activities like lifting or...
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Caffeine & Cholorogenic Acid - Anti-Obesity Agents from Your Coffee Mug? Human Study Reveals Cortisol Lowering Effects, Mouse Study Confirms Anti-Obesity Effects

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Ever since the Vinson study showed that green coffee bean extracts can help overweight women lose weight, green coffee is sexier than roasted one. Only weeks after Vinson et al. were able to show that "Green Coffee Bean Extract Helps Pre-Obese Men and Women Shed 16lbs in 22 Weeks" ( read more ), green coffee bean supplements began to swamp the market - a great financial success for the supplement producers, and that despite the fact that follow-up studies that would confirm the amazing effects Vinson et al. report are still lacking. Two recent studies, one from the Queen Margaret University in the UK (Revuelta-Iniesta. 2014), the other from the  Jiangxi Agricultural University in the People's Republic of China (Zheng. 2014) could now shed a little more light on the weight loss effects of green coffee beans and the combination of caffeine and cholorgenic acid (CGA), the allegedly most important active ingredient in unroasted, green coffee beans. There is evidence of...
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Maintain & Increase Your Insulin Sensitivity - Wrap-Up: Overview + 3 Stacks. Plus: AMPK & PPAR-γ Revisited

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It's not about exercise or nutrition, it's about both of them. And as long as it is not about the former it should not be about supplements either. It's Sunday and finally time for the wrap up of the "Maintain & Increase Your Insulin Sensitivity" Series ( read all previous installments ). It took me quite some time to get through all the compounds on my and your list and the outcome is far from being a "complete" list of all the agents that can have beneficial effects on your insulin sensitivity. Still, if there is at least one agent, one fact or one take home message for each of the 6 previous articles of which you would say: "Ok, I guess that was worth wasting some of my valuable time on", I would be happy. For myself it was by the way yet another occasion to learn more  about many of the agents, I reviewed in this series . And if you listened to the SuppVersity Science Round-Up on Thursday , you will probably remember that I said...
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Fighting to Stay Lean? These 20+ Anti-Obesity Agents Have the Potential to Inhibit Fat Gain Right at the Cellular Level

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No, none of the 20 agents in the list below is going to do the work for you, but they could help you "conserve" the results, keep you lean on a bulk and/or avoid the hazardous Yoyo effect when you go off a die. It's actually normal that the introduction is the last part of an article I write. What's special about today's SuppVersity article is thus not that I write the introduction at the end, but that I did not really know what I would be writing here, when I set out to compile the unsorted (but not chaotic) list of potential anti-obesity agents below. All of them act by pathway(s) you as a SuppVersity reader will have read about before, most prominently AMPK , and the peroxisome proliferator receptors (PPARs), of which the blockade of the obesogenic PPAR-gamma pathway, which is the main working principle of CLA turned out to be the go-to explanation for the ability of these agents to block both the differentiation of adipocytes and the storage of tr...
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