SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

If you want to practice "vorschlafen" you may have to set your alarm-clock to tell you when to go to bed. "Vorschlafen" is the German term for getting extra sleep the nights before an event of which you know that it will leave you sleep deprived. Sounds stupid? Well, there are studies which show that increasing sleep duration for around one week may influence cognitive performance during a subsequent sleep loss period, but aside from a study on the accuracy of tennis serves (Schwartz. 2015), their practical significance for athletes is obviously limited. Why? Since your ability to focus during cognitive tasks is - as important as it is - not a reliable marker of exercise performance... or at least a very unreliable one. Against that background it's good that in a new study from the  Université de Lyon ,   Instead of testing cognitive performance markers such as the attention span of an individual, the researchers set out to "assess the effect of 6 nig...

Can you partly redeem your sleep dept on the weekend? First study to investigate this question in clinical trial suggests: Yes you can! At least to a certain extent. In today's installment of the short news I am going to take a closer look at the surprising results of a recent study from the  University of Sydney (Killick. 2015). A study which may offer some relief to those of you who are for one reason or another not getting enough sleep on a regular basis. If that sounds like you, you may be interested to hear what happened to the healthy male 18-50-year old subjects in the latest study from the University of Sydney . A study the objective of which was to determine whether the ill effects of acute sleep restrictions on insulin sensitivity in healthy individuals could be leveled by recovery or a few nights spend on "catch-up sleep" (10h per night). Learn more about the health effects of correct / messed up  circadian rhythms Sunlight, Bluelight, Backlight and...

The answer to post-positioned question in the headline of today's SuppVersity article is not easy to find. Therefore I will start with the facts. Facts, researchers from the University of Sfax present in their latest paper in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Psychology & Behavior ; facts that leave little doubt that 5 mg/kg of caffeine could counteract the negative effect of 36 h of total-sleep deprivation on physical and cognitive performances, if your body would still react to stimulus - in other words: If your body still reacted like the bodies of the 13 healthy male habitual caffeine- not - ab using physical education students (age: 21.1 ± 1.1 years; body mass: 77.1 ± 7.2 kg; height: 1.77 ± 0.06 m) who volunteered to participate in the present study, it would get you going - seriously! The students had exactly the same time schedule at the university from sunrise to sunset under the control of the experimental team. Parti...

The healthy lifestyle rhythm: "Sleep, eat, train, live, sleep,..." × 365 days/year If you were expecting any obscenities in today's "Sleep Quickie", you will probably be disappointed to hear that this article is solely about sleep, metabolism and melatonin and how all that relates to "shutting your eyes and disappearing into the land of dreams". This means that it won't touch on the 19% increase in copulatory efficiency and the other "significantly facilitated" aspects of sexual activity (mounting latency -80%, ejaculatory latency -63%, etc.) scientists from the University of British Columbia observed in melatonin treated (4 mg/L of drinking water) Long-Evans rats (Brotto. 2002). Rather than that we are going to focus on the non X-rated semantics of "to sleep", its health effects and the role of melatonin in sleep, health and disease. So, let's see what we've got in stock for you: Profound effects of sleep res...

The insights may be based on data from a fruit flies, but the the differential effects of high vs. low taurine / caffeine ratios on wake-, respectively sleepfulness concur with my own N=1 experience. It's been a while since we've had a cup of the former Brew of the King's together. Therefore it occured to me that it would be high time to brew not just but three refreshing cups of hot coffee... ah coffee / caffeine news for us. If you feel that's way too much, you may avoid one of them, but the way I know the average (=extraordinary ;-) SuppVersity reader, you will have downed them in less than 2 minutes, anyway and if you are lean and healthy the average effect is, as the first and good news is going to tell you will have little but beneficial effects on your ability to keep just that. Too late? I mean, you're afraid it could keep you up, then I suggest you start with #3 of today's coffee-pot s pourri and learn how taurine could help you sleep like a ...

In general it's certainly a good idea to rise, when the cock crows on the dung heap, but what if that means you miss 90 min of your precious sleep? "Tell me how and how long you slept last night and I'll tell you something about your chances of getting / staying lean and healthy!" It sounds more straight forward than the stupid AM vs. PM system you, my American friends, are still sticking to: If you consistently miss just one hour of sleep, you are messing with your insulin sensitivity, body weight and your plasma concentrations of leptin. But is this actually accurate and " how much messing " does it actually take? A close analysis of a recent study by a group of researchers from University of Surrey in Guildford, UK (Robertson. 2013), does at least raise some questions in how far smaller deviations from your usual 24/7 x 365 consistency will mess with your physique and health. Can you "wake your way" towards obesity? "Mild sleep re...

Without an optimized dietary routine, a sound training plan and tons of discipline no fat burner is going to get you abs like these (suggested read: The SBSG Fat Loss Support Routine ) I suppose by today, the last remnants of your turkeys should be gone and you and your relatives ~0.5kg heavier (Hull. 2006). Against that background it appears only logical to turn this week's installment of On Short Notice into another Get Lean & Stay Lean Quickie . Moreover, with the 0.5kg the average American gains in the course of the Thanksgiving holidays, I already have my (or should I say your ? Be honest ;-) figure of the week, so that there is actually no reason why we could not dive right into the science of fat loss. As you are about to see, this installment has more ineffective than effective fat loss treats. Why? Well, maybe due to the fact that it harbors two studies on commercially available supplements? But whom am I telling this... you already know that the main benefits o...