SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Don't obsess about "optimal" antioxidant contents, just eat your veggies! Over the past couple of weeks, ... no actually over the past years I have repeatedly written about the concept of (mito-)hormesis and its consequences for the well-established, but not necessarily accurate free radical theory of aging (and for some people everything else). ROS, i.e. reactive oxygen species, have been established as an important signalling molecule that is - among other things - heavily involved in the insulin sensitizing effects of exercise. "Inflammation" makes muscles grow and burns body fat and the "what doesn't kill me makes me strong" principle appears to reign everywhere you look. You can learn more about the secrets of longevity at the SuppVersity Are You Stressed Enough to Live Forever? Suffocated Mitochondria Live Longer Get Lean & Live Longer With I. Fasting Can You add 9 Years to your Life W/ Glucosamine? 5+ Tips To...

This is not exactly what I was talking about, when I said "going nuts", but in this case it would actually qualify as "going pistachios" ;-) Walnuts, almonds and Brazil nuts, these are the stars among the hard-shelled fruits people tend to go nuts about (all puns intended ;-). Pistachios, on the other hand, get very little love. I have in fact written about their surprisingly low effective energy content and their highly bioavailable phenolic content before ( learn more ), but what the myriad of phenols in these small nutritional powerhouses the ancient Egyptians used as incense, preservative and breath sweetener, while their Iranian neighbors in the North East already knew about their beneficial effects on digestive, hepatic and kidney health (Avicenna. 2008) can do for our health has not been covered here at the SuppVersity . So what is it pistachios can do for you? With their traditional use as a remedy for digestive, liver and kidney issues, you already ...

Image 1: Even if you align them like that, it is at least debatable whether capped fish oil is much more natural than the structurally modified 16 -carbon saturated fatty acid tetradecylthioacetic acid (TTA). As far as their effects on weight loss are concerned, the latter is certainly more potent,... the debate on the side-effects of both is yet still far from being settled. Despite the mainstream hoopla around the former... At least for those of you who have been around the supplement world for some time, the acronym TTA, which stands for tetradecylthioacetic acid , a structurally modified 16 -carbon saturated fatty acid (SFA), which has been shown to increase fatty acid oxidation and reduce triglyceride levels via interactions with purportedly all PPAR-receptors, should ring a bell. For the rest, it will yet probably be news that, back in the early 2000s, TTA was all the rave as the new star among OTC-fat burners. And in fact, the weight loss people experienced on respective pr...

Image 1: Bought in bulk, grape-seed extract is actually reasonably cheap... and it does not even taste as awful as some other herb / seed extracts ;-) After initially being hailed as the yet another anti-oxidant panaceum, grape-seed extract (GSE) has been displaced by newer, fancier "superfoods" from the headlines of the major health and wellness newscasters. Therefore, even you, as a highly self-educated student of the SuppVersity could have missed out on a handful of recently released studies which reported antiviral effects of GSE ( Su. 2011 ) and confirmed its ameliorative effect on diet-induced obesity ( Ohyama. 2011 ) and (high) fructose-induced insulin resistance ( Meeprom. 2011 ). Moreover, a meta-analysis of nine controlled with more than 300 human subjects and daily doses ranging from 250mg to 2,000mg of GSE, which was published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association ( Feringa. 2011 ), found that ... [b]ased on the currently available literature...

Image 1: Susan Kokesh, blogger and the Crazy Running Mum at the Sierra Nevada ultra-endurance run a 52.4 miles "double marathon"   in September 2010; I probably would not even have survived this torture - respect! As a health conscious physcial culturist, you are probably aware that the vitaminesque nutrient CoQ10, which, due to its ubiquitous presence in all living beings, is also known as ubiqinone , plays a fundamental role in cellular bioenergetics . It is a necessary cofactor in the mitochondrial electron transport chain (i.e. your cell's way of "breathing", its respiratory chain) and is therefore essential for the production of ATP, the fundamental energy unit your cells are operating on. In that, CoQ10 works as a mobile redox agent that shuttles electrons and, interestingly, also protons (those little blue and red balls from Bohr's atom model ;-) in the electron transport chain. Within the health and fitness community, it is however better known...

Image 1: Potato roasting caveman-style - probably not the best way to "cook" your potatoes As a non-native-speaker, I must admit that the first time I heard someone talk about "tubers" was on Robb Wolf's famous podcast, back in the day, when I was "listener #6" (or seven ;-). Contrary to common (foreign) belief, not all Germans subsist on potatoes and sauerkraut and, what's more, even those who do, don't really care that a potato is a "tuber", i.e. a "Knolle" in German - I suppose the idea that it grows in the dirt is not too appealing to some, while the large majority probably just doesn't care as long as those "tubers" make a good addition to their Schweinebraten... yet, whatever the reasons may be, my first encounter with "tubers" has ingrained the link of these "underground structure[s] consisting of a solid thickened portion or outgrowth of a stem or rhizome, of a more or less rounde...

Image 1: Walter Breuning died in April 2011at the biblical age of 114! And you bet that a man who has seen two world wars has had his share of mitohormetic stress in his life. As a diligent reader of the SuppVersity you will be familiar with the work of S. Schmeisser and M. Ristow from the Department of Human Nutrition at the University of Jena , here in good old Germany (where not everyone eats Sauerkraut und Weisswurst, even now that the Oktoberfest is in full swing). In previous publications, the scientists have (at least in my mind conclusively) argued against the publicly accepted free-radical hypothesis of aging, which implies that the presence of free radicals is one of the fundamental mechanisms of aging. Now, a few month after the publication of their last review back in May 2011, they are presenting the latest results from their own lab in a paper that is going to be published in the October issue of Hormone and Metabolic Research ( Schmeisser. 2011 ) . Want to liv...

Image 1:  I don't think celebrities realize it, but there is more to anti-aging than an unlined face. New studies show that DHEA could after all help with all sorts of age related diseases (img. antiagingpossible.com ) It's been a while since DHEA was in the news. While I have posted a handfull of mostly beneficial findings related to dehydroepitestosterone (DHEA), the hype that sourrounded its purported anti-aging effect in the late 1990s has completely abated. In view of DHEA's implication  (or rather the lack of the latter) in age-related autoimmune disease, sexual disfunction, osteoporisis, deteroiations of lipid metabolism, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular and liver disease (Basci. 2007- ignificance of  dehydroepiandrosterone  and  dehydroepiandrosterone  sulfate  in  different  diseases), it is questionable how people beyond the age of 40, when DHEA production declines by 2% per year...

Image 1: Now, that we know that meat is not bad for you. Let's get to the meat of the matter: Is raw meat better than cooked meat? "Eat Raw!" If its referring to peppers, tomatoes and salads, even the Vegan lobby won't disagree with this slogan, yet when it comes to eating raw meat, dairy and eggs, hell breaks lose. "Don't do that you will kill yourself!" is what you will hear even from respected scientists. Strangely, I am eating raw eggs and other raw stuff on a daily basis without noticing any detrimental health effects whatsoever. All bacteria-hysteria aside (this would be the topic for a whole new blogpost, cf. red info-box at the bottom), the idea that meat has to be cooked before it is eaten is actually counterintuitive . I do not want to bring up the "Look at the lion, does he cook his pray before savoring on his bloody prey?"-debate, but didn't you ever ask yourself, why the same pe...