SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Carnosine + anserine supps could help her keep up with her grand daughter - physically and mentally! As a SuppVersity reader you know that  carnosine is the stuff you actually want to increase, when you are taking beta alanine supplements - you want the beta alanine to bind to L-histidine and from β-alanyl-L-histidine aka carnosine. If you are a student who reads and memorizes all article and not just a diligent reader, you will also remember that carnosine acts as a cellular "stress" buffer and that this buffer, as important as it may be during intermittent high intensity exercise, is actually even more important for your neuronal health, or put simply, your brain! So, even if you haven't heard about anserine before, at least the idea that taking carnosine supplements, or maybe I should say, increasing brain carnosine levels could be a good thing for your cognitive abilities should sound vaguely familiar... and if it does not, this would be another reason to read ...

Tired, exhausted, had to cut your workout short today? Is it the flu, or just too much BCAAs? When some is good and more is better, even more is not necessarily going to be 'betterer' - and that's not simply due to the fact that there is no comparative to an adjective that's already in the comparative. Therefore it is actually not surprising that a team of researchers from the Department of Food and Experimental Nutrition at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences , the Department of Nutrition at the School of Public Health and the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences of the University of Sã o Paulo in Brazil has just published the results of a study (Falavigna. 2012) which demonstrates that there is an upper limit to the benefits of BCAA supplementation. What I guess will be surprising at least for some not so regular SuppVersity visitors, is that there is more than just a saturation effect: Too much BCAAs can actuall...

Image 1 (msg-exposed.com): Is obesity the inevitable, unnatural metabolic long-term equivalent of the dreaded "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome"? Earlier today, I posted a blurb from a recently published epidemiological study on the effects of mono-sodium glutamate, aka MSG, an umami = all taste receptor activator that is commonly found in all sorts of ready made foods that would otherwise taste as lame as their individual fake ingredients, on the SuppVersity facebook wall (Insawang . 2012). The scientists had evaluated the data from 324 families (349 adult subjects, age 35–55 years) from a rural area of Thailand and found that the prevalence of metabolic syndrome was not just significantly higher in the tertile with the highest MSG intake, but that the "odds ratio", i.e. the chance that a certain parameter, in this case "obese, yes/no" would be found to be true, increased with every 1 g increase in total MSG intake irrespective of  the total energy inta...

Image 1: Photograph of acute MCA stroke. Image taken at autopsy on 10-24-2006 [MODIFIED BACKGROUND]; photographer Marvin 101 @ Wikipedia.org Alpha-methylguanidino acetic acid, is an amino acid, everyone of you will be familiar with: creatine. And though this may not be the first time you will have heard of its beneficial effect on brain health, the synthesis of new forms of creatine, so called creatinyl amino acids by guanidinylation of sarcosyl peptides or creatine p-toluenesulfonate [both reactive processes in the course of which the new creatinyl amino acid is formed] appears to offer exciting new possibilities for creatine derivates in the prevention and treatment of stroke and other neurological pathologies. In a paper, recently published in the official Journal of the European Peptide Society, Peptide Science , Burov et al. ( Burov. 2011 ) describe the synthesis and possible use of advanced hydrophobic creatine hybrids...