SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Teddy bears are like vitamin C and zinc. They can help you when you are already sick, but what are supplements athletes and gymrats take in advance to survive the flu season without getting sick at all? Specifically during the winter time, hard working athlete and manic gymrats can be particularly susceptible to all sorts of infections. To help you having to work out with a handkerchief in your hand all winter long, I have compiled a non-comprehensive list of supplements that may help you to maintain and even improve your immune defenses and thus to survive the cold and dark winter times without catching a cold or even the flu. In their recent review in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition Vinicius Fernandes Cruzat, Maurício Krause and Philip Newsholme reviewed the extensive literature on nutritional supplements that act as immuno-nutrients, may to reduce immunosuppression and excessive inflammation in hard-training athletes and gymrats like yourself (or ...

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...

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...