SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

PWO alcohol is not for male athletes. But before you rejoice, ladies. The ill health effects of a given amount of alcohol are more severe for the fairer sex. It's Christmas! And you can almost smell the new year with its smell of alcohol approach... and that's bad news for your gains, as a recent study in the latest issue of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research  shows. With a study on the possible interference of upper body training on your leg-day recovery (Abaïdia. 2017), and the purported benefits of lactic acid bacteria for athletes' immunity (Michalickova. 2017), Duplanty's study, which shows that alcohol will impair the adaptation to resistance training in previously resistance trained men , but not female trainees w/ RT experience (Duplanty. 2017), constitutes what's probably going to be the last SuppVersity  Science Update for 2016. Read about rather exercise-related studies at the SuppVersity TeaCrine®, Tribu-lus, Cordyceps, ALA, Se...

Image 1: Other than you may have expected, this is exactly not what happened when the soccer players took 6mg of melatonin before their workouts. The blogpost on melatonin's anti-Alzheimer's + anti-obesity effects from last week caused quite a stir, both in the comment area, here at the SuppVersity, as well as on facebook. Even friends in the gym came up with questions. Therefore, I suppose that you won't mind, if I re-address the topic today. This time, however, with data from a human study , of which I bet that it will catch your interest... after all, the study, which has been published ahead of print two days before Christmas could hold the key to winning the FIFA World Cup 2014 ;-) Melatonin makes you sleepy? I don't think so! I guess, even after last week's news , most of you will still think of melatonin as the "sleep hormone". At least those of you who follow my recommendation to make sure that they get their daily dose of SuppVersity new...

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I am generally opposed to mega-dose supplementation with isolated nutrients and so I do not really know what to make of the results of a recent investigation ( Kara. 2011 ) into the effects of 5mg/kg bodyweight zinc -sulfate on cytokine response in 15–17 year-old male subjects. At the beginning of the study, there were no significant differences of the measured parameters between the four study groups. At the end of the study, the levels of TNF-α, IL-2, and IFN-γ were significantly higher in the two zinc-supplemented groups compared to those that did not receive supplementation, regardless of the activity status ( p  < 0.01). Most interestingly, mega-dose (I do not really get, why the authors call 350mg zinc , which would be the dose for a 70kg subject still "physiological") zinc-sulfate supplementation elevated TNF-alpha, IL-2 and IFN-Gamma by >90% regardless of whethe...