SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

TRT - What to expect in terms of its effects on a man's body composition? If you hear people talk about "gear" (=performance enhancing drugs | PED), you get the impression that one injection of testosterone, nandrolone and co would turn a scrawny beginner into an Olympian. Reality, however, looks much different ... in fact, the number of people who ruin their health with (often oral) designer steroids without seeing any of the results they expect has been increasing continuously over the past years (Baker. 2006a,b; Graham. 2008; Rahnema. 2014) and that despite the fact that the "Anabolic Steroid Control Act" of 2004 was originally meant to prevent exactly that from happening (Herschthal. 2012). In spite of the fact that the introduction of today's SuppVersity article focused on PED, the purpose of the meta-analysis and thus its summary was "systematically review [...] available observational and register studies reporting data on body composition ...

Could a high dose of purified saponin tribulus extract as it was obviously used in the study at hand actually be a valid TRT alternative or even option?  No, this is not the 2015 study in trained boxers that found similarly surprising, because impressive benefits from tribulus terrestris (TT) supplementation ( read it ). It's a new study from the  Jerzy Kukuczka Academy of Physical Education  in Katowice, Poland (Wilk. 2016) that has no direct link to the previously discussed study from the   Shanghai University of Sport Affiliated School of Sports in China. And even though, the aim, i.e. to determine the effects of steriodal saponins from tribulus terrestris on the blood concentration of testosterone (T), GH and IGF-1 was similar, the overall design of the study was significantly different. Don't forget to work out - Without exercise you're not going to get lean and jacked, bro! Tri- or Multi-Set Training for Body Recomp.? Aug '15 Ex.Res. Upd.: Nitra...

"Get leaner, more muscular and hornier than ever before" - That's probably the promise on the T-booster someone will release after reading this SuppVersity article and sourcing an inferior Shilajit extract on Alibaba. No, I hadn't heard of Purified Shilajit (PS), either, before I read about it in a very recent study in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Andrologia (Pandit. 2015). Actually, the study was first published in online (ahead or print), in late 2015. It took several months for it to be finally available in print and to appear on my "study radar", though. Shilajit is traditionally used in Ayurveda, an indigenous system of Indian medicine, as a remedy for several diseases, particularly chronic diseases. It is a pale-brown to blackish-brown exudate that oozes from sedimentary rocks worldwide, largely in the Himalayas. The natives describe it as pahar-ki-pasina (sweat of mountains), paharki-khoon (mountain blood), shilaras (rock juice), asphalt...

Which of the dirty dozen of supplements and foodstuffs in today's SuppVersity review can really help you to make sure, you're not the one out of those nine men who develops prostate cancer? Supplements that are supposed to protect you from developing prostate cancer and/or agents that may help patients with existing prostate issues are - obviously - in high demand. And as W. Merkle points out in a recent article in the German science journal Urologe using them - even if they may not be as effective as some patients may believe - makes sense: from a psychological perspective, alone (Merkle. 2014). Taking a pill with selenium, for example, has been shown to alleviate some of the side effects of chemotherapy. General protective effects against prostate cancer, on the other hand, have not been established. In fact, the most recent studies rather suggest that "supplementation did not benefit men with low selenium status but increased the risk of high-grade PCa among men ...