SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Ever since the Vinson study showed that green coffee bean extracts can help overweight women lose weight, green coffee is sexier than roasted one. Only weeks after Vinson et al. were able to show that "Green Coffee Bean Extract Helps Pre-Obese Men and Women Shed 16lbs in 22 Weeks" ( read more ), green coffee bean supplements began to swamp the market - a great financial success for the supplement producers, and that despite the fact that follow-up studies that would confirm the amazing effects Vinson et al. report are still lacking. Two recent studies, one from the Queen Margaret University in the UK (Revuelta-Iniesta. 2014), the other from the  Jiangxi Agricultural University in the People's Republic of China (Zheng. 2014) could now shed a little more light on the weight loss effects of green coffee beans and the combination of caffeine and cholorgenic acid (CGA), the allegedly most important active ingredient in unroasted, green coffee beans. There is evidence of...

I am sorry, but I have to tell you: Significant weight loss does not happen without effort. Even if you take a pill that comes with just this promise. I guess you will not have heard about "IQP-GC-101", before - right? Well, me neither, but it is obviously a patented blend of a bunch of very familiar weight loss adjuvants, namely Garcinia cambogia , Camellia sinensis , unroasted Coffea arabica (aka green coffee bean extract), and Lagerstroemia speciosa . All of them were pressed into tablets, the scientists from InQpharm , the producer and patent owner handed to 92 German subjects who had volunteered to participate in a double-blinded randomized study in the course of which they had to (a) adhere to a -500kcal/day energy deficit and (b) consume three tablets of either IQP-GC-101 or an identically looking placebo twice a day - once 30min before breakfast and once 30 minutes before lunch. The "lose fat effortlessly"-myth is not the only one, learn more about ...

As we are about to see coffee is by far not the worst aflotoxin offender in the human diet. Still, that does not mean that the coffee related exposure to this form of mold that can befall all sorts of grains, nuts and seeds is harmless. You will probably remember that I casually touched on the possibility of being exposed to aflotoxins and more importantly ochratoxins as a result of the consumption of mold-infected coffee in previous coffee articles . When the issue of the « coffee ➲ aflotoxin / ochratoxin exposure ➲ serious health » triage resurfaced in a brief facebook conversation, recently, I realized that I was not 100% sure if these mycotoxins that are produced by Aspergillus flavus , Aspergillus ochraceus, Aspergillus niger , and Aspergillus carbonarius do or don't pose a serious health risk. Well, you know how much I hate unanswered questions, so I kept digging until I'd found what I consider to be a half-way satisfying answer to this life-or-death question...

"Done,... where is my post-workout coffee?" - Post workout caffeine / chlorogenic acid - good or bad idea? I know it's kind of late to post an article like this months after the ISSN conference, but I recently hit on an overview of the poster presentations and noticed that I did actually miss a couple of interesting studies. Don't worry, I won't be addressing a couple of them in the weeks to come in some detail. Not all are really news-worthy, but aside from today's item on caffeine and chlorogenic acid , there were also posters on nutrient timing , different forms of protein , commercially available supplements and other stuff that's all classic "SuppVersity fodder"? Chlorogenic acid? Isn't that Ozzy's green coffee bean stuff? You are correct, but could actually read about it here at the SuppVersity way before it was on Dr. Oz . Plus, I still believe that there is something wrong with the corresponding study and do still hav...

Image 1 (sodahead.com): Another reason to supersize your cup of coffee; no not the girl, or ... well ;-) Those of you who can no longer be without their well-deserved daily dose of SuppVersity news will probably remember the amazing weight loss effects an extract from green coffee beans yielded in a 2012 trial by Vinson et al. (cf. " GCB Another Fatloss Acronym: Green Coffee Bean Extract Helps Pre-Obese Men and Women Shed 16lbs in 22 weeks "; Vinson. 2012) and while I am still not convinced that you would see similar results in non-obese individuals, another recently published study by Novaes et al. does suggest that even those of you who don't think that they have another lbs of body fat to spare, could largely benefit not just from the caffeine, but also from the 0.5-1.0g of chlorogenic acid and the subsequent conversion of the latter into 250-500mg of 3,4-Dihydroxycinnamic acid (3,4-DA) even 400ml of regular coffee do contain (Chung. 2004; Novaes. 2012). 3,4-DA...

Image 1: Coffee! Would you have recognized it? HCG, GTE, GSE, DNP and obviously ECA! If you have ever done some research into pharmacological and non-pharmacological weight loss agents, you are probably familiar with this alphabet soup. But would you know right off your head what GCB stands for? No, ...? "G" as in "green", "C"  as in "coffee" and "B" as in "bean" - if you make it GCBE, with an "E" for "extract" it could make another item on your list of potential weight loss tools - moreover, one that has actual human data to back it up. Green seems to be a good color for weight loss ;-) In a recently published paper, a group of scientists from the University of Scranton , in the US, and the Health Sciences Clinic in Bangalore, India, report on the results of 22-week cross-over trial, in which the researchers tested the efficacy and safety of high (3x 350mg) and low (2x 350mg) doses of a commercia...