SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

No this is not Liza Oz after taking Mehmet's beloved RK supplements ;-) The Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition is one of the few "major" scientific journals, where scientists can actually publish those studies, "healthy freaks" (no, not "health freaks", but people who are still healthy and thus freaks ;-) like us are interested in. Studies such as the one Hector L Lopez and his colleagues conducted; studies that investigate the effects and effectiveness of dietary supplements such as Prograde Metabolism (TM), a proprietary blend "fat burner" containing your usual blend of B-vitamins, chromium, caffeine, citrus aurantium, ginger, garlic, capsaicin, l-theanine and piper nigrum... ah, and of course as the #1 ingredient on the label Raspberry-K (TM). Too much blubber? "Grab the rasp and berry it off!" Ah, well... Hold on, another of those "proprietary blend studies"? Can we even trust the data...

 Grains of paradise pods - do they hold the secret to "true" fat thermogenic fat burning for those who are lucky enough to have a significant amount of brown adipose tissue (BAT) on their frame? (Photo by Inna Moody / Flickr: innamoo ) Just got an email from my friend Carl Lanore, who dug up a soon-to-be-published study on the thermogenic effects of ginger... well, not exactly ginger as in Zingiber officinale but rather "ginger" as in Grains of paradise (GP). Huh? Yeah, sounds more as if you had bought it in a "coffee shop" or another outlet for legal highs, but it's actually a species of the ginger family, Aframomum melegueta to be precise that contains a similar composition of the characteristic pungent, aromatic ketones such as 6-paradol, 6-gingerol and 6-shogaol. In previous rodent studies an alcohol extract of GP seeds and 6-paradol has been shown to activate BAT thermogenesis in small rodents and in the study at hand it did the exact same ...