SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

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...

Gram negative bacteria, as these E. coli bacteria which have been photographed with a low-temperature electron micrograph (magn. x10,000) tend to produce endo toxins in your gut, while gram positive bacteria tend to produce exo toxins on your food - nasty, ha? It has been estimated that a single cell of Escherichia coli contains approximately 106 Lipid A or endotoxin molecules with a mass of about 1 00,000 Da (the exact mass varies according to the LPS type). The typical human intestinal tract can harbor approximately one gram of endotoxin, which is ~2-4x more than what scientists used in previous rodent studies as a "lethal dose" (Kawai. 1991). Aside from the information about the lethal dose of endotoxins in rodents, these figures, which are at the same time the SuppVersity figures of the week are part of the study by Mani et al. with which we are going to kick off this week's installment of On Short Notice . I guess these figures give you an idea of the toxic p...