SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Nigella sativa is not well known in the West. You may remember the SuppVersity special on Nigella sativa from January 2015. A special, in which beneficial metabolic effects of nigella sativa aka black cumin were only one item on a long list of health benefits, of which many had unfortunately been observe in rodent studies. With a recent study from the Tabriz University of Medical Sciences , there's now evidence for humans that the fat loss benefits of the oil from nigella sativa are real - at least when it is ingested before meals by dieting overweight individuals. Learn more about the effects of your diet on your health at the SuppVersity Only Whey, Not Soy Works for Wheytloss Taste Matters - Role of the Taste Receptors Protein Satiety Shoot-Out: Casein vs. Whey How Much Carbs Before Fat is Unhealthy? 5 Tips to Improve & Maintain Insulin Sensitivity Carbohydrate Shortage in Paleo Land We are talking about a double-blind, placebo-controlled, ran...

Nigella sativa is available in form of seeds, oils and all sorts of ointments and for many of them there are studies suggesting that they work. SuppVersity reader Amaan Mueen asks on Facebook: "In traditional Oriental medicine it's said that blackseed is a cure for everything except death, is there any truth to that?" I probably don't give away too much, when I tell you that blackseed (also "black seed") aka "nigella sativa" is not going to cure everything, but death, but that does not mean that modern Western medicine has not been able to confirm what Oriental "doctors" have known for centuries. In the following I am going to present an allegedly cursory overview of the existing evidence with a focus on those health benefits that could be relevant for the average and extra-ordinary SuppVersity reader. Learn more about the effects of your diet on your health at the SuppVersity Only Whey, Not Soy Works for Wheytloss Taste...

Is a small bowl of yogurt with 1.5g cumin better than every weight loss drug? Probably not, but if we go by the results of the study at hand, it's a damn effective adjunct to an energy reduced diet. The figures in the headline of today's SuppVersity article certainly are impressive. The total weight loss, the 88 overweight / obese women who had been randomly assigned into two groups who dieted for 3 months either with or without the help of 3 g/d cumin powder with yogurt at two meals (each time 1.5 g cumin + 150 ml low-fat yogurt | the control group received the same amount of yogurt, but without cumin) on the other hand sounds less exciting. 6.2kg in the cumin and 4.19kg in the control group - that does not sound much for "obese / overweight" women. Luckily Iranian "obese women" are comparably slender compared to their Western counterparts. With a starting weight of 79.43kg in the active and 76.7kg in the control arm of the study, those 6.2kg and 4.1...

Three weeks of +1,000 kcal carb overfeeding (approx. 194 bananas!): Does it supersize your liver fat? This and more in today's installment of On Short Notice As promised in yesterday's first part of the weekly written news-round up aka On Short Notice , we won't waste any time on lengthy introductions (the "short" items themselves are already long enough ;-) and get right down to business! For today this means that we are going to take a peak at the latest studies on the reality of thyroid hormone metabolism the dampening effects of sugar on high dose caffeine the sugary truth about the reversibility of early NAFLD the pro-testosterone, pro- fertility effect of black cumin as well as the latest data on US drug sales and an upcoming blogpost discussing "training for anabolism" - enjoy ! Just in case you feel that's not enough, I suggest you listen to this week's installment of the SuppVersity Science News Roundup ( click here to ...