SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

You are probably popping POPs (per-sistent organic pollutants) with your fish oil supplements; and even if your blood lipids would suggest the pills are helping, you may slowly, but progressively be running down your anti-oxidant defenses. From my previous articles about fish oil you will remember that the often-cited heavy metals may actually be the lesser of two evils of commercially produced fish oil. A recent study from the  San Diego State University  does now appear to confirm that lead and mercury could in fact be of less concern than the omnipresent persistent organic pollutants (POPs) In fact, scientific studies show that the consumption of fatty fish and fish oil supplements is an important point of entry of POPs into the human food chain, exposing populations to toxic compounds such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and organochlorine pesticides (OCs). In that, Contamination with POPs in fish is not limited to certain regions or species. It is, rather, glob...

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...

Image 1: Selenium is a naturally occurring mineral involved in a host of metabolic processes. Are you a hard training athlete? A weekend warrior? Marathon runner? Or just an an average fitness-enthusiast? Yes? Did you ever think about what an exhausting workout, let alone arduous marathon running may do to your brain? No? Then it may come as a surprise to you that other than regular moderate physical exercise, which has repeatedly been shown to exert beneficial effects on mental and physical development, intense exercise precipitates oxidative stress not only in the working muscle groups, but within your whole body - including your brain, where the exercise-induced increase in free-radicals may dramatically increase lipid oxidation ( Goldfarb.1996 ; Kanter. 1998 ). Based on observations with other antioxidants and the well-established involvement of selenium in the activation of the master-antioxidant glutathion , researchers from the Selcuk University in Konya, Turke...

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...