SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

19 Billion Euro that's the estimated 2011 financial burden due to lung cancer, alone, here in Europe and the On Short Notice figure of the week (information based on ESMO2012 press release) Those of you who are also following the SuppVersity facebook news , will probably recognize the figure on the right: 16,000,000,000€ or $24,419,000,000 , that's the estimated economical burden due to lung cancer, alone, here in Europe (cf. " Who cares if people are dying as long as the economy is thriving? "). An enormous financial loss, and still not the reason that this is my figure of the week . Rather than the financial damage, itself, it is the tragic fact that only the latter, yet not the fate of the patients and their families, would make a valid argument, when policy makers were debating a long overdue, total and all-encompassing public smoking ban... but now for a couple of more sciency, yet not less intriguing news from the past week. Problems thinking straight?...

Image 1: The ketogenic diet is also referred to as the long chain triglyceride diet by some dieticians (image from fingercandymedia.com) In view of the current low-carb hype, people tend to forget that, after all, carbohydrate consumption has been shown time and again to improve the performance of endurance athletes. And despite the existence of a few studies about "fat adaption" which report equal or even improved endurance performance in athletes on low carb diets, previous findings of Murray and his colleagues from the Department of Physiology, at the University of Cambridge clearly showed detrimental effects of short term high fat feeding (9 days) on the exercise capacity of rats. These results are corroborated by findings of Holloway et al. ( Holloway. 2011 ) who found cardiac high-energy phosphate metabolism and cognitive function to be impaired in healthy human subjects on a high-fat diet. Now, it is quite obvious that these findings stand in contrast to all the...

"Keto diets are unhealthy! You simply do not get enough quality nutrients if you do not eat your healthy pasta, bread and other starchy carbs." I suppose many of you - just like me - cannot tolerate the black-and-white thinking of either of the two, the high or the low/no carb camp and are thus as interested in the recently published results from a 12 month dietary intervention using either a classical ketogenic diet ( Christodoulides. 2011 ), which uses long chain triglycerides as its primary source of fatty acids, or a medium chain triglyceride ketogenic diet , where the majority of fatty acids came from MCT oils [unfortunately the scientists used Liquigen or MCT oil (both SHS International) instead of a natural source of MCTs, like coconut oil] on vitamin and mineral status of 49 children (age 2-16 years). Although the results are somewhat skewed due to the extensive use of supplements - apart from the MCT oil in the MCT group, all children received an additional mulit ...