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Overtrained or in the Zone? Tests & Analyses of Samples of Athletes' Saliva Shall Help Determine Objective Criteria

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Could something as simple as a saliva test tell you if you or your clients are overtraining? I mean, common sense would dictate that cortisol, free T and IL-6 should tell us something. Salivary testosterone, cortisol, and interleukin-6, those are the three parameters Travis Anderson and colleagues had on their list of candidates when they conducted their latest study at the University of North Carolina  (Anderson. 2016). As you will remember from previous articles I wrote about overtraining. The only decently reliable method of seeing it coming is to assess you heart rate variability. On the other hand, athletes who are complaining of general fatigue and decreasing performances in the latter phase of their overtraining, when the symptoms become often almost unbearable, will also show high cortisol, low free testosterone and increased IL-6 levels. If you want to mess with your cortisol rhythm overtraining is exactly what you "need"! Heart Rate Variability (HRV) ...
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IL-6 - True Muscle Builder or Just a Measure of Workout Intensity? Plus: If Testosterone Does Not Matter, Why Does the Androgen Receptor Density Make a Difference?

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No matter how close we look, the influence of previous, i.e. GH, IGF-1 and testosterone, as well as novel, i.e. IL-6 and AR expression, potentially growth promoting suspects remains elusive. SuppVersity readers know, there is more to " inflammation " than the average mass media article will make you believe. The same "bad cytokines" that will decrease your insulin sensitivity, make you sick and obese, when they leak from your "inflamed" beer belly, are actually the good guys, when they are released in response to a workout from the musculature. "Myo-", not "cytokines", that's how researchers refer to them (Pedersen. 2007); and their role in (exercise) metabolism and immunity is until now still not fully understood. The results the scientists from the McMaster University probably won't add much to our understanding of the systemic effects of IL-6 and other myokines. What certainly do, though, is to support the notion that ...
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Understanding Muscle Hypertrophy - Study Sheds More Light on Process of Satellite Cell Recruitement: SRF, IL-6, STAT3, COX2, IL4 + More Funky Acronyms With Important Roles in the Structural Component of Muscle Growth.

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No pain inflammation, no gain? In the long(er) run this could in fact be true. All of you who followed my advice to "like" the SuppVersity Facebook page and are thus keeping up with the numerous additional news I am posting there, should actually have seen the news item on the non-significance of the exercise-induced interleukin-6 (IL6) response for the exercise induced improvements in glucose metabolism ( read more ). The mere fact that the glucose metabolism of IL6(-) mice, which are mice who simply cannot express IL6, is still improved by "working out" does yet by no means preclude that the demonized cytokine does play a fundamental role in the exercise-induced systemic and local benefits. In fact, an even more recent rodent study would suggest that a certain degree of inflammation and the respective increase in IL6 immediately after a workout is even essential for persistent skeletal muscle hypertrophy. As you may remember from the Intermittent Though...
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Easy Whey to Prevent LPS Induced Inflammation? Whey Protein Prevents LPS Binding to TRL-4 and IL-8 Production. Surprise: Pressurized Denatured Whey Works Best!

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Unlikely that this or whatever whey protein you have bought as of late was pressurized with an Avure High Pressure Processing System at more than 500mPa in order to denature it (yeah you're reading right) and produce a bunch of fancy new peptides which appear to have even more potent anti-LPS effects than those in regular whey protein (hydrolysate). Saturday's post on saturated fatty acids and their negative effects on post-prandial endotoxemia has turned out to be (un-)surprisingly popular. I am still not sure if this will be same for the post at hand; and that despite the fact that it revolves around the exact same topic, namely the inflammatory reaction to lipopolysaccharides (LPS). In the case of endotoxins such as LPS, the inflammation, which is, as you all should by now be aware of, an endogenous "alert, defense and repair" reaction of our bodies, is actually triggered by their interaction with the so-called toll-like-receptor. Now scientists from the McGi...
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Intermittent Thoughts on Building Muscle: IGF-1, TNF-α, IL-15 & Co and the Emerging Role of an Auto-/Endocrine-Immune Axis in Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophy

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Image 1: The word "inflammation" triggers associations which hinder a appropriate understanding of the complexities of the "inflammatory" immune response that is vitally important for (re-)building muscle tissue. Just to make sure that I do not get off another tangent, again, I will start right off, where I left you in the last installment of the Intermittent Thoughts and that was with the promise to have a closer look at the intricate relationship of (exercise-induced) inflammation and the increases in muscle-specific insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) and its splice variants, above all the muscle (re-)building mechano-growth factor 1 (MGF-1). Before we are looking how one influences the other, we will yet have to establish a consistent understanding of "inflammation" , which, despite being in on everyone's lips these days is commonly (mis-)understood and / or confused with "oxidation", as in the oxidation of "inflammable" ...
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Vitamin D3 a "Fat Synthesizer"!? Rodent Study Shows +33% Increased Fat Deposition in Vitamin D3 Supplemented Mice.

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Illustration 1: Experts will recognize from looking at these Oil Red O-stained longissimus dorsi slices of mice on a normal and a vitamin D3 supplemented diet that supplemental (! not vitamin D from the sun !) "vitamin D3 can be used a s a fat synthesizer and meat tenderizer in meat-producing animals". (img in illustraton from Choi. 2011 ) I have been railing against the current vitamin D hype for months now. In that, I have at no point in time implied that "backfilling" depleted vitamin D levels via supplementation could not be beneficial (or at least not harmful), nor have I at any time excluded that vitamin D3 supplementation (even if you are in the "normal" range) could have its merit (cf. vitamin D3 + HMB ). What I have done though, was to point at the lack of controlled studies that would support any of the benefits supplemental vitamin D3 is currently hailed for all over the Internet. This amazes me, because the very same "gurus" who...
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Something Fishy: Leucine-Rich Protein + Fish Oil Supplement Boosts White Blood Cell EPA Content and Immune Response

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Regular readers of the SuppVersity, as well as people who religiously follow Carl Lenore's Super Human Radio and happened to listen to my 1st appearance on the show, will know that I am generally skeptic about the usefulness of unwarranted high dose (>1-2g of combined EPA + DHA) fish oil supplementation. This is not because I think fish oil is poison, but rather out of my awareness that its pharmacological effects have more similarity to those of a drug than to those of a "common food" (including possible side effects). Now, a group of scientists from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom published the results of a study ( Faber. 2011 ) which found another interesting stone from the fragmented mosaic our current understanding of the effects and nutritional interactions of fish oil, in general, and EPA, in particular, resembles. While the aim of the study, which was to quantify the incorporation of EPA and DHA into white blood cells, was nothing new, the nutritional ...
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Fat or Fire, What Comes First? Scientists Answer: Obesity Alone Triggers Inflammatory Signaling in Mice

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The metabolic syndrome, i.e. the combination of obesity, inflammation and insulin resistance, is at the center of contemporary medical research. In my appearance on Carl Lenore's Super Human Radio , I already mentioned that from a logical perspective the mainstream belief, inflammation was the root of all evil, must be flawed. How should the reaction to a problem be the cause of the very problem itself? A recent study coming from a group of Korean scientists strengthens my conviction that out of the triad that not inflammation, but rather obesity or - one step further up in the genesis of the pathology - the combination of an unhealthy diet and a sedentary lifestyle is at the heart of the triad we now call the "metabolic syndrome". Kim et al. investigated the pro-inflammatory signaling cascade in either diet-induced (DIO) or leptin gene deficient (ob/ob) obese mice and found that obesity alone ... [...] up-regulated the expression of TLR1–9 and TLR11–13 in murine adip...
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