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High School Athletes on Dope? Not Really, But Roughly 1/3 Uses "Performance Enhancing Supplements"

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"Don't you take those steroids!" Does this remind you of your mother, when, back in high school, you bought your first tub of creatine monohydrate ? Recent doping "scandals" have, yet again, raised the awareness, or should I say panicky fear of parents and coaches that their children and wards are going to be delinquent, when they save their allowances for a shopping spree at the local GNC. Accordingly, many of them will not be happy to hear that a recent study published in the Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research ( Piattolly. 2011 ) found that "[a]lmost a third [32.2%] of the high school sample surveyed reported using nutritional or performance enhancement supplements." Figure 1: Type of performance enhancing supplement used by high school athletes (data adapted from Piattolly. 2011 ) Interestingly, of those 32.2% of the young athletes that reported using supplements, the majority were male (87%) and in the age group of 15-17 year-ol...
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Oral ATP Supplementation Proves Completely Ineffective Even at Very High Doses

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I think most supplement companies have hitherto given up on convincing you of the use of oral ATP supplements. About 2 month ago, I did however notice a new "high dosed" product (I cannot remember the figures out of my head, but the daily dose was far below 1.000mg) was released to be bought by the in-educated public ;-) Just to discourage you from wasting your money on any such products, here is a very recent study ( Coolen. 2010 ) on the futility of attempting to rise ATP levels via oral supplementation: Thirty-two healthy subjects were randomised to receive 0, 250, 1250 or 5000 mg ATP per d for 28 d by means of enteric-coated pellets . In addition, on days 0 and 28, all thirty-two subjects received 5000 mg ATP to determine whether prolonged administration would induce adaptations in the bioavailability of ATP. ATP supplementation for 4 weeks did not lead to changes in blood or plasma ATP concentrations. Of all ATP metabolites, only plasma uric acid levels ...
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Whey Protein Isolate Increases Strength Gains over Carbohydrate Control

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Regular readers of the SuppVersity, won't be surprised to hear that Cooke et al. ( Cooke. 2010 ) found that supplementing a group of 17 previously untrained participants (23 +/- 5 yr, 180 +/- 6 cm, 80 +/- 11 kg) with a) whey protein isolate (WPH; n=9) or b) carbohydrate (CHO; n=8) at 1.5 g/kg.bw/day supplement (~30 g consumed immediately, and then once with breakfast, lunch, in the afternoon and after the evening meal) for 14 days resulted in a significant positive effect on exercise recovery and plasma creatine kinase and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) levels: Figure 1: Strength development in a) whey and b) carbohydrate groups. ( Cooke. 2010 ) Isometric knee extension strength was significantly higher following WPH supplementation 3 (P<0.05) and 7 (P<0.01) days into recovery from exercise-induced muscle damage compared to CHO supplementation. In addition, strong tendencies for higher isokinetic forces (extension and flexion) were observed during the recovery p...
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MRI's NO2 Platinum: Useless Arginine Supplement!?

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Regular visitors of the SuppVersity will remember the study on Size On Maximum Performance , which - despite being financed by Gaspari - showed, from an objective perspective, only marginal effects on exercise performance. MRI was not so lucky to sponsor Reid et al. (Reid. 2010) who studied the effect of their pre-workout product, NO2 Platinum exercise induced increases of nitric oxide: From the pre-exercise blood samples at each exercise session, L-argninine decreased 0.89% in the placebo group after supplementation, whereas the NO2 group significantly increased 84.67% (p = 0.001). Brachial artery blood flow was significantly increased in both groups (p = 0.001) immediately post-exercise, but was not different between groups . Nitric oxide was shown to significantly increase in both groups (p = 0.001) immediately post and at 30 min post-exercise, but was not different between groups. eNOS was significantly increased in both groups (p = 0.028) immediately post and at 30 ...
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Vitamin D Deficiency Impairs Learning

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They keep coming, and I keep repeating myself: vitamin D is the most interesting "novel" supplement out there. A recent study Mohsen et al. ( Mohsen. 2010 ) found that vitamin D deficiency, apart from increasing risk of fractures and metabolic diseases, also impairs learning. Investigating the learning process of water maze the scientists found: The C-D [vitamin D deficient] group needed a longer time to reach the platform than the control and C+D [vitamin D repleted] animals (P<0.0001), demonstrating that vitamin D deficiency negatively affected the maze learning. On the other hand, calcitriol supplementation did not significantly influence the spatial learning. In view of these facts: If you do not notice that I posted the following only a few days ago,  "So, do your heart, your pancreas and, not to forget, your bones a favor and grab some vitamin D supplements ." ( Vitamin D: 1 Billion People Worldwide Are Vitamin D Deficient or Insufficient ) you either did...
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Brassaiopsis glomerulata: Novel Natural Aromatse Inhibitor in Driven Sports Triazole

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Figure 1: Chemical structure of selected components of Brassaiopsis glumerulata ( Balunas. 2009 ) Now, that the craze about USPs Pink Magic is just abating, a new purported supplement blockbusters from Driven Sports , called Triazole , is already on it's way to the market shelves. It must have been a 2009 study by Bulanas et.al. ( Balunas. 2009 ) which inspired Matthew Cahill and his team to include pZole , a propietary extract of Brassaiopsis glumerulata , in the formula of what they advertise as "the Estrogenic Equalizer". In fact, the results of the aforementioned study are promising. Out of the 13 components the scientists isolated from this shrub of family Araliaceae , no. 9, 10 and 12 (cf. figure 2) appear to be promising candidates for over-the-counter aromatase inhibitor of the year. Figure 2: Aromatase activitity after preparation of hormone-independent human breast cancer cells that overexpress aromatase with selected component from  Brassaiopsis gl...
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