SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Carrots and blueberries - superfoods you cannot ruin by grinding, blending and even the falsely depreciated use of the microwave oven. Cooking / Food-Processing Done Right: 5 Things to Remember to Make the Most of the Antioxidant Prowess of Your Foods Cooking or the preparation of food (food processing at home) is something I would love to address more often. Unfortunately, studies such as Boyan­ Gao's recently published paper in "Food Science & Nutrition" are truly rare. In said paper, the Chinese scientists followed up on recent studies that indicate that different food preparation methods could significantly change the chemical profiles and bioactivities including the antioxidant and real-world anti-inflammatory activity of (super-)foods. Learn more about the effects of your diet on your health at the SuppVersity All About Almonds and Their Health Effects Taste Matters - Role of the Taste Receptors Egg-Ology, Today: Why Eggs are Awesome Walnut...

Hot or not? That could be a matter of health or ah... well almost death ;-) Usually a "tea" is a hot beverage, right? No? Well, ok there's ice-tea, but even the coolest of all teas is initially brewed with hot, sometimes almost boiling water. A practice of which a recent study from the   Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná in Brazil suggests that it may actually impair some of the beneficial effects of Baldo, White, Black and Mate tea. How come? Well, in the study Vanessa de Carvalho Rodrigue, et al. conducted, it made a huge difference in terms of the total phenol and flavenoid content of the extracts (=the aformentioned teas) when the scientists used cold water instead of water that was 80°C "hot". You can learn more about tea at the SuppVersity Use Roiboos for Stress & Virus Control Tired? Theacrine Will Get You Goin' in Minutes Milk, Tea & Honey Don't Mix?! Theacrine or Caffeine for Brain Power? Aluminum, Lead...

The supplement that was used in the study at hand was a commercially available product from Olimp Labs, a Polish producer of bodybuilding and fitness supplements. Before I even go into more detail, I would like to point out that the study today's SuppVersity article will talk about is not able to answer the question whether anti-oxidants are for athletes once and for all. Why? Well, the subjects in the recently conducted experiment by Ewa Jówko, Barbara Długołecka, Beata Makaruk and Igor Cieslinski were sprinters from a University Sports Club, and they received a green tea supplement - so who can guarantee that a bodybuilder taking vitamin C would not have a totally different reaction to a totally different anti-oxidant? No one can and that's why I'd like to ask you to go back to some of the previous articles on that matter and remind yourself that there is evidence that the provision of significant amounts of supplemental antioxidant can blunt the beneficial adapti...

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...

As we are about to see coffee is by far not the worst aflotoxin offender in the human diet. Still, that does not mean that the coffee related exposure to this form of mold that can befall all sorts of grains, nuts and seeds is harmless. You will probably remember that I casually touched on the possibility of being exposed to aflotoxins and more importantly ochratoxins as a result of the consumption of mold-infected coffee in previous coffee articles . When the issue of the « coffee ➲ aflotoxin / ochratoxin exposure ➲ serious health » triage resurfaced in a brief facebook conversation, recently, I realized that I was not 100% sure if these mycotoxins that are produced by Aspergillus flavus , Aspergillus ochraceus, Aspergillus niger , and Aspergillus carbonarius do or don't pose a serious health risk. Well, you know how much I hate unanswered questions, so I kept digging until I'd found what I consider to be a half-way satisfying answer to this life-or-death question...