SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Reader's question from the SuppVersity's Instagram page: "I wonder if just having a small serving of beans before a meal would have good effects also. Red velvet, black, etc." - Johan Those of you who already follow the SuppVersity on Facebook will have seen the news item ( in the infographic section ) about the latest bean-carb-blocker study. Some may even have seen that there were a lot of comments, comments in which you repeatedly found the question whether, instead of the stupid bean extract, one wouldn't be able to simply eat a bunch of beans before or with the meal and see the same potentially weight-reducing effects that were reported in the study. Well, it turns out it is not that easy to find an answer to this question - especially not one that is workable, i.e. "eat exactly X grams of THIS type of beans at timepoint T to improve your glucose metabolism by Z and lose BETA kg of weight in GAMMA weeks." What I could come up with, however, ...

The (ill) health effects of choline and its pre-cursor l-carnitine in animal products like eggs or (red) meats are probably mediated by a diet devoid of prebiotics... however, simply pounding more resistant starches, for example, seems to do more harm than good. If you have been following the SuppVersity  News on Facebook ( a must , btw ;-)), you will be aware of the "TMAO"-issue. If not, here's the gist: The ingestion of certain dietary nutrients - primarily choline, phosphatidylcholine, and its precursor l-carnitine can serve as a precursor for the ultimate generation of an atherogenic metabolite, trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO). TMAO, in turn, has been linked to all sorts of diseases, most prominently cardiovascular disease and the formation of atherosclerotic plaque. Unlike "fish odor disease", the choline/CVD link is unrelated to  your genes : DNA-Fit: Train Acc. to 'ur Genes Is Laziness Built Into 'ur Genes? Keep Muscle While Dieting...

RS4 is still relatively difficult to come by. Options I know of are ActiStar® from Cargill  and Fibersym® fom MGP . RS2 and RS3 alternatives are raw potato starch and, as previously discussed, banana starch or reheated starches. They'll have (presumably) very similar effects, but come directly from food. You will probably remember the good old " Waxy Maize Reloaded " article from 4 years ago that caused quite a stir!? Well, I guess four years is a long time - more than enough to revisit the idea of designer resistant starches and their effect on your physique and performance. To do so, I've picked two recent studies from the  South Dakota State University (Upadhyaya. 2016) and the  Florida State University (Baur. 2016) that have one thing in common: they add to the hitherto still inadequate number of studies on resistant starch type 4 (RS4), one out of five forms of "resistant", i.e. (partly) undigestible, starches with significantly different chemica...

This is what it's all about. Real food does not come in form of "macros". It comes in form of complex food matrices that determine its effect on one's health - including one's glycemic health. You will probably remember that I have touched on a specific aspect of the effects of and interactions between different macronutrients in what scientists often refer to as "food matrices" on the glycemic response to standardized glucose loads in previous articles like the famous "True or False?" article that dealt with the question: "Will Adding Fat to A Carby Meal Lower the Insulin Response?" ( read it ). You don't remember this or any of the other articles? Well, in that case, I probably have to tell you again  that the mere fact that the postprandial glucose are lower does not mean that a certain food or combination of certain macronutrients would increase your insulin sensitivity (adding fat to a high carbohydrate meal certainly d...