SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

If glycine worked in athletes as it did in pigs or even isolated muscle cells, in which scientists recently observed a dose-dependent increase in protein synthesis (up to 80%) and reductions in protein degradation (-30%), it would be a go-to supplement for dieting athletes. Glycine is not exactly the most popular amino acid supplement in the health and fitness community. With recent studies by a group of Chinese and American scientists from the State Key Laboratory of Animal Nutrition  in China and the Texas A&M University , this may change - rightly so? Only recently Wang et al. were able to show that dietary glycine supplementation enhances skeletal muscle growth in young pigs (Wang. 2014a,b) - an excellent model of human metabolism. In view of the fact that the mechanism has hitherto not been fully understood, it was difficult to judge whether the smallest possible amino, i.e. glycine, could / would be useful for trainees as well. Learn more about amino acid supple...

I still believe that the ill effects of fasting on skeletal muscle are way overrated, but  I guess it won't hurt if you would be able to minimize it by sipping 60g of protein, right? A new study says: That's right, but there's more to it. While the beneficial effects of whey protein and leucine have been shown to be independent of age and route of administration in anabolic conditions, there is, as scientists from Aarhus University Hospital  point out, almost no information "about the effects of leucine-rich protein supplementation to humans during catabolic conditions such as fasting" (Rittig. 2016). This is however, only partly right. From previous articles here at the SuppVersity  you know that studies investigating the effects of protein supplements on muscle protein maintenance exist and that the effect is - due to increased wastefulness - less pronounced than you probably hoped for. Learn more about high-protein intakes / diets at www.suppversity....

Not basing both the ketogenic and regular very low calorie diet on whole foods, only was only one of at least 3 problems with the study at hand that can thus not be considered the ultimate litmus test to compare VLCD with en vogue VLCKD diets. Ketogenic diets are characterized by constantly low insulin levels. That's not exactly what has been considered muscle protective in the old age of bodybuilding, where insulin's protein-anabolic and anti-catabolic effects were still hailed as a benefit you wouldn't want to miss (Fulks. 1975; Woolfson. 1979), but according to a recent study from Rome, a ketogenic diet may be the go-to diet for everyone trying to shed as much as weight as possible in as little time as possible by cutting your total daily energy intake down to a hilarious <700 kcal/day (Metta. 2016). Now, cutting calories back that much may sound (and be) idiotic for someone who has been lean all his / her life and is just trying to make his abs more visible. Fo...

To guzzle BCAAs all day or not - is that still a question or is the answer settled with the publication of two recent studies? From previous SuppVersity  articles about BCAA you will know that I don't buy into the hype supplement producers generate about the muscle-building and/or muscle-protective effects of high dose BCAA- or leucine-only supplementation. One of the previously mentioned issues with BCAAs are their putative ill effects on neurotransmitter levels in the brain - effects that had only been observed in rodents, though. Now, a recent study in pigs, who are a much better model of human metabolism (even much better than most apes | Miller. 1987), is fueling the concerns about the pro-depression effects of high dose leucine supplementation. Learn more about amino acid and BCAA supplements at the SuppVersity Peri-WO BCAA Blunt Fat Loss Whey + C Kicks BCAA Ass Alanyl-Glutamine is it any good? Glutamine Insted of CHO? GLU as Intra-Workout BV? ...

"Shed the fat, keep the muscle!" That's a promise you will find not literally, but analogously in every ad for BCAAs, but do they actually do that? Help you shed fat and retain muscle? Scientific prove to support this claim is, as of yet, missing. With BCAAs it is just as it is with 99.9% of the supplements: Ads and product labels are full of scientifically unproven claims. One of these unproven claims is that the consumption of branched-chain amino acids would protect you from losing muscle while you're dieting ... the problem with this notion is - as sound as it may seem in view of the mTOR promoting effects of leucine, there's no study which would prove that guzzling BCAAs all day will in promote fat and blunt lean mass losses when you're cutting.... or I should say "as of now, there was no study...", right? After all, there's this new study by Dudgeon et al.'s the abstract of which tells us that "BCAA supplementation in trained i...