SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Cancer, Alzheimer's - The X* effect? *Most deodorants don't contain aluminum. I have to admit that I missed the original publication of the inconspicious statement of the Bundesintitut für Risikobewertung (BfR. 2014). I am not sure if there is a US or UK equivalent to the BfR, but if there was an US counterpart, those would be the guys that would tell the FDA what they should do, if the industry, the FDA is actually supposed to control had not already taken their job ;-) All (sadly true) jokes aside, basically the short paper is a re-evaluation of the safety of aluminum - not aluminum in general, but the amount of aluminum in our immediate surrounding. Sources like the particularly nasty Aluminum from antitranspirants Table 1: Overview of the "worst offenders" among foods and bakery products scientists from the University of Kentucky (Saiyed. 2005) Processed foods provide the toxic baseline: Antitranspirants are part of the problem, but as usual it'...

Rosy, but rusty: "Fresh" meat packaged with 70% oxygen. I don't know about the US, but most of the "fresh" meat, you buy at the Supermarket here in Germany is packaged in what the label calls a " Schutzatmosphäre ". Literally translated this means nothing but a "protective atmosphere" and it refers to the supposedly bacteria-free high oxygen air that's pumped into the airtight packaging in which the chicken breasts and beef steaks, the pork and lamb and all the other appetizingly looking meats are stored for up to a week in the fridges of the meat counter. Good to now it's protected! Right? If you ever bought a product like that you will have realized that you can easily store it for the whole 7day+ period in you fridge and - as long as the airtight plastic container is not broken - it will look and smell almost as it did on day one, when you rip the container open and take a closer look, whether the meat you are about to prep...

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: If this photo looks as if it was taken in your neighborhood, statistics say that you will have a harder time than others warding off obesity. If you have not already been aware that the major weightloss obstacles are not so much of physio- than of psychological, or I should say behavioral natural, Monday's blogpost on the inability or unwillingness of the majority of the study participants in the Krebs study should have reminded you that there is more to losing weight than having an "optimal" diet plan. In this context, the results of a recently published paper from the University of Ottawa , Canada ( Prince. 2012 ), comes to mind, in which Stepanie A. Prince and her colleagues report the results of a large-scale cross-sectional multi-level analysis of the association between neighborhoods, physical activity and obesity in Ottawa. Mislead and misfed, but by no means unable to afford leading a healthier life-style Although obviously of epidemiological na...

Image 1: Looks like humans are not the only lazy creatures, in these days of unhealthy convenience. Laziness, it seems, is utterly human. If you look around, these days, it appears as if we were genetically programmed to be bone idle . And, from an evolutionary perspective, we may actually be. After all, moving around, hunting and gathering was an obligatory part of our lives in 99% of the human history. It was thus only consistent that our genes would tell us to sit down at the fireplace and relax, once we had found enough to eat on a given day... (un-)fortunately things have changed since those early days. Not only have we moved out of our caves, we have also found ways to radically reverse the ratio of activity to inactivity in our lives. "Convenience" is the buzzword of the modern western civilization and the obesity epidemic is its unwanted consequence. A consequence, which is yet by no means inevitable. After all, we all know that getting our behinds off our cou...