SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

I would not expect "red palm olein wonders", but more RPO and less corn oil in the American diet may at least buffer the liver disease burden in the US (the figure is based on data provided by the American Liver Foundation) On Turesday, November 19, 2013, you've learned from a study by Subermaniam et al. about the "anti-rust" effects of coconut oil (if you missed that, you can catch up here ), today, we are going back to Malaysia and the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and the results of another team of researchers to learn about the effects the various oils have on the "oiling of the liver" (Dauqan. 2013). I guess most of you will remember my previous comments about the critical role of the liver (and its health or disease) in the development of the metabolic syndrome ( read it up ). It is thus by no means irrelevant, whether the chronic ingestion of a certain type of oil will result in MDA levels of 92µmol/g or  27.3µmol/g. Boring!? No, rathe...

Could a daily dose of virgin coconut oil really be all it takes to escape the #1 leading cause of death (CDC data) - despite French fries and co? Originally I wanted to post the results of this study from the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia as a short news item in the Facebook News . Then I decided that it may actually be worth to allow you to have a look a the surprisingly pronounced effects the addition (not replacement!) of 3-4 tablespoons of virgin coconut oil had on the in vivo lipid oxidation levels of rodent hearts in the course of this 4 months study at the end of which the researchers did not simply measure the systemic, but the more significant local malondialdehyde (MDA) levels. With the direct analysis of the presence of lipid oxidation production in the heart being a more reliable indicator of whether or not the changes the researchers observed in the study at hand are physically relevant... Ah, I don't want to give it all away. So let's rather take a look a...

"What? Don't gimme that look. I did walk to the fast-food outlet. I swear!" - When it comes to how much they sit around, people love to lie... ah, I mean they often overestimate their activity level - especially the really lazy ones ;-) It's not always easy to find a "figure of the week" and actually the on I am going to present you today is not "week specific". It is rather related to yesterday's post on the statistics of the diabesity epidemic . That said, you may remember that the gap between "more" and "less" active individuals was widening, but on average the NHANES stats would suggest that the average US citizen is not sitting around much longer today (or rather in 2004) than 40 years ago. Now, the NHANES data is based on a questionnaire of which Healy et al., who have analyzed the accuracy of these self-reported activity levels in a 2010 paper (Healy. 2011), found that the difference between the real and the clai...

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...

Image 1: Bought in bulk, grape-seed extract is actually reasonably cheap... and it does not even taste as awful as some other herb / seed extracts ;-) After initially being hailed as the yet another anti-oxidant panaceum, grape-seed extract (GSE) has been displaced by newer, fancier "superfoods" from the headlines of the major health and wellness newscasters. Therefore, even you, as a highly self-educated student of the SuppVersity could have missed out on a handful of recently released studies which reported antiviral effects of GSE ( Su. 2011 ) and confirmed its ameliorative effect on diet-induced obesity ( Ohyama. 2011 ) and (high) fructose-induced insulin resistance ( Meeprom. 2011 ). Moreover, a meta-analysis of nine controlled with more than 300 human subjects and daily doses ranging from 250mg to 2,000mg of GSE, which was published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association ( Feringa. 2011 ), found that ... [b]ased on the currently available literature...

If you are no regular visitor of the SuppVersity, I guess, you are religiously taking your (high dose?) fish oil , day in day out. So what? It probably l owers your total and low density cholestero l (LDL-C; it may reduce your triglycerides and thus improve your insulin sensitivity . Yet, in doing all those "great" things, the unmetabolized and peroxidized remainder of everyone's favorite wonder-supplement begin to clog your arteries and liver - at least, if you believe in the validity of that kind of rodent studies which suggested the usefulness of fish oil, in the first place. Image 1: Micrograph of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, caused by the same kind of lipid accumulations Shirazi et al. observed in the rats receiving fish oil treatment (image by Nephron ) Shirazi et al. ( Shirazi. 2011 ) recently published a paper reporting exactly that: "Fish oil increases atherosclerosis and hepatic steatosis, although decreases serum cholesterol in Wistar rat...

Regular readers of the SuppVersity will certainly be familiar with the sulfur-amino-acid taurine and its various benefits on exercise performance, insulin sensitivity and weight management. So, it may not come as a surprise that a recent study conducted by young scientists from the Postgraduate Program in Health Sciences at the Universidade do Extremo Sul Catarinense in Brazil found that 14-days "preloading" with 300mg/kg taurine per day reduced the exercise induced increase in oxidative stress in rats. Taurine supplementation was found to decrease superoxide radical production, CK [creatine kinase], lipoperoxidation and carbonylation levels and increased total thiol content in skeletal muscle, but it did not affect antioxidant enzyme activity after EE [excentric exercise]. It is rather speculative, whether standard dose equivalent calculations apply to one situation or another - IF they did, you could probably get away with as little as 3.5-4.0g of taurine per day ...

Treatment with estrogens, mainly in women, and selective estrogen modulators (SERMS), which are also interesting for the average juicer, may yield hitherto unknown metabolic side effects. Scientists from Portugal ( Moreira. 2010 ) have found that both, tamoxifen as well as estrogen treatment influence the oxidative capacity of mitochondria: Fig. 1. Effects of E2 and/or TAM treatments on glutathione levels of liver, heart and brain mitochondria. ( Moreira. 2010 ) In spite of the distinct effect on glutathione levels, their effect on lipid peroxidation appears to be contrary: TBARS levels were used to determine the extension of lipid peroxidation (PX) induced by the pro-oxidant pair ADP/Fe 2+ . Fig. 3 A shows that liver mitochondria isolated from E2 + TAM females in the presence of ADP/Fe 2+ produced significantly lower levels of TBARS when compared with liver mitochondria isolated from the other groups of experimental animals. No significant alterations were ob...