SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

You will find dozens of ginger + lemon water recipes on the internet - all of them can pimp your peri-workout drinks and make your tummies "exercise proof". As a regular here at the SuppVersity  you know about the beneficial health effects of ginger . It has potent anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory effects without the usual side-effects of COX-inhibitors (Mashhadi. 2013), has been shown to have anti-cancer effect on it's own (Kim. 2005), as well as to be a perfect adjunct for conventional cancer therapy (Sontakke. 2003). Ginger has also been shown to exert cardioprotective effects (Ghayur. 2005; Singletary. 2010), strengthens the immune system (Butt. 2011) and significant beneficial effects on the health of the digestive system - including the make-up of your microbiome (Sutherland. 2009). One thing that should be in your peri-workout (best post-workout) regimen is  creatine   Creatine Doubles 'Ur GainZ! Creatine, DHT & Broscience Creatine Bett...

Whipped cream with strawberries - is it actually healthier with pastured cream? Is it less obesogenic, soothes inflammation and increases the oxidation while reducing the storage of body fat? I guess I could have made two separate articles of the two recent studies from the University of Lyon (Benoit. 2014) and the INRA in Paris (Marsset-Baglieri. 2014), but in view of the fact that there are already plenty of dairy articles at the SuppVersity, I thought, I'd pack them into one large "Dairy Double-Whammy Appreciation Article"; and in that I am about to start with something the average SuppVersity reader should know already: "Milk protein fractions moderately extend the duration of satiety compared with carbohydrates independently of their digestive kinetics in overweight subjects." Well, at least the first part shouldn't be news. The fact that this happens independent of their digestive kinetics, on the other hand, may come as a surprise. You can le...

Unlikely that this or whatever whey protein you have bought as of late was pressurized with an Avure High Pressure Processing System at more than 500mPa in order to denature it (yeah you're reading right) and produce a bunch of fancy new peptides which appear to have even more potent anti-LPS effects than those in regular whey protein (hydrolysate). Saturday's post on saturated fatty acids and their negative effects on post-prandial endotoxemia has turned out to be (un-)surprisingly popular. I am still not sure if this will be same for the post at hand; and that despite the fact that it revolves around the exact same topic, namely the inflammatory reaction to lipopolysaccharides (LPS). In the case of endotoxins such as LPS, the inflammation, which is, as you all should by now be aware of, an endogenous "alert, defense and repair" reaction of our bodies, is actually triggered by their interaction with the so-called toll-like-receptor. Now scientists from the McGi...

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...