SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

"Wouldn't have happened if she'd used alanyl-glutamine instead of regular that cheap alanine + glutamine combo!" - True or False? Recent study says: False! If you combine your liver's favorite gluconeogenic amino acids, i.e. alanine and glutamine, into a single peptide the result is called alanyl-glutamine and marketed as the ueber-potent alternative to regular l-glutamine supplements. It goes without saying that a comparison like this is about as stupid as comparing french fries with mayo to regular french fries and saying that the former are worse because they contain more fat, or whatever. Even if we didn't care about the physiological significance of the effects of alanyl-glutamine, we would obviously have to compare the purported cryogenic effects of this "innovative" dipeptide to those of a simple combination of free form amino acids to deserve the bragging rights for having created an advanced form of glutamine. Alanine + glutamine vs. a...

Have you ever felt nauseated after a workout? Or does your protein supplement gives you diarrhea only if you take it right after a workout? Both can be related to the toll  exercise can take on the integrity of your intestinal tract. To be honest, I was quite surprised that I did not get a hell lot of hatemail in response to the the 'MSG heals the gut study' I posted last Sunday ... Be that as it may, I feel sort of awkward to have opened Pandora's box without proving you with some betters tools than mono-sodium glutamate (MSG) to seal the box, or rather your leaky gut, again. Therefore I decided to post this mini-feature on a particular issue all of us will be dealing with: An exercise induced increase in gut permeability. As you are going to see, there are a lot of similarities to the 'classic' leaky gut, which is often implicated in the etiology of chronic inflammatory bowel diseases. In order to understand these similarities, but also the few, yet importan...

Image 1: You may already have read it on the SuppVersity Facebook Wall ; "Sacrificing sleep in order to study won't improve your college grades..." it could however easily whack your circadian rhythm and give you headaches. If those turn into a migraine, you may be happy to have read about beneficial effects of magnesium on the incidence of these crippling and painful attacks (see last item in this installment of " On Short Notice " ). In order to avoid having another weekend of " On Short Notice " posts, I decided to post the first collection today, already. The topics are, as usually, only loosely related and I hope that each and everyone of you will find something he or she considers interesting. We'll start out by having a brief look at the amazing antioxidant effects of red onions, and then delve deeper into the connection between obesity and low ferritin levels and a brief reminder that sometimes good things can become bad, if they are ...

Image 1: Are women tougher than men, because bathe more often? If you define toughness by your muscles resistance to eccentric exercise damage, the answer could be "YES!" If you listened to Brooks, Carl and me on Super Human Radio , yesterday ( download the podcast ), you may remember me stating that 48h appears to be a good rule of thumb, as far as the rest periods between workouts for individual body parts are concerned (this assumes that you are young, healthy, reasonably conditioned and lift heavy). A recently published paper by Chad D. Touchberry  does now suggest that there may be another 48h window before your workout ( Touchberry. 2012 ). One you would use a priori to improve your recovery a posteriori - preconditioning in a hot bath for 20 min at 41°C, 48h before a hard workout or competition! Eccentric treadmill running = maximum muscle damage At least in a rodent model, those 20 min of heat exposure in 41°C warm water lead to statistically highly signific...