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Recent Studies Cast Shadow Over High Dose BCAA Intake: Increased Protein Wasting, Lower Brain Serotonin and More

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To guzzle BCAAs all day or not - is that still a question or is the answer settled with the publication of two recent studies? From previous SuppVersity  articles about BCAA you will know that I don't buy into the hype supplement producers generate about the muscle-building and/or muscle-protective effects of high dose BCAA- or leucine-only supplementation. One of the previously mentioned issues with BCAAs are their putative ill effects on neurotransmitter levels in the brain - effects that had only been observed in rodents, though. Now, a recent study in pigs, who are a much better model of human metabolism (even much better than most apes | Miller. 1987), is fueling the concerns about the pro-depression effects of high dose leucine supplementation. Learn more about amino acid and BCAA supplements at the SuppVersity Peri-WO BCAA Blunt Fat Loss Whey + C Kicks BCAA Ass Alanyl-Glutamine is it any good? Glutamine Insted of CHO? GLU as Intra-Workout BV? ...
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Leucine Only Tops Ergogenic Effects of BCAAs: Increased Alanine Cycle Activity Spares Muscle Glycogen, Boosts Endurance Performance - BCAAs Have Opposite Effect

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Alanine is the liver's favorite gluconeogenic amino acid and leucine appears to increase its usage. Being among the first to learn about the "Glucose-Repartitioning Effect of Iso-Leucine" in February 2013 ( read up on it ), you, as SuppVersity reader, belong to the selected few who know that valine and isoleucine may be more than unnecessary props in the leucine-powered BCAA show. With the recent publication of a rodent study from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil (Campos-Ferraz. 2013), however, it looks as if you had to revise your perspective on the purportedly auxiliary BCAAs - at least, with respect to their ability to reduce fatigue, and muscle and liver-glycogen degradation, in trained rats and possibly (!) humans. So what did the Brazilian researchers do? Basically, the idea Campos-Ferraz et al. had in mind, when they came up with their 8 week exercise + 2 week supplementation protocol (see Table 1 ) was to ... Table 1: Exercise progression; suppl. ...
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Chronic High Dose BCAA Supplementation Reduces Endurance Performance by 43% Plus: How Ammonia, Glutamine, Arginine & Low Carb Could be Involved

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Tired, exhausted, had to cut your workout short today? Is it the flu, or just too much BCAAs? When some is good and more is better, even more is not necessarily going to be 'betterer' - and that's not simply due to the fact that there is no comparative to an adjective that's already in the comparative. Therefore it is actually not surprising that a team of researchers from the Department of Food and Experimental Nutrition at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences , the Department of Nutrition at the School of Public Health and the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences of the University of Sã o Paulo in Brazil has just published the results of a study (Falavigna. 2012) which demonstrates that there is an upper limit to the benefits of BCAA supplementation. What I guess will be surprising at least for some not so regular SuppVersity visitors, is that there is more than just a saturation effect: Too much BCAAs can actuall...
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High and Low Dose BCAA Supplementation Have Minimal, Non-Significant Effects on Markers of Muscle Damage 24h and 48h Post Heavy Resistance Training

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Image 1: Cover of the September issue of the International Journal of Wrestling Science - don't tell me you don't have a subscription, yet! I don't know about you, but I feel that it's quite interesting to look at the highly heterogeneous dosage suggestions on the labels of the ever-increasing number of BCAA supplements on the market. Interestingly, almost every producer claims in his "non FDA-approved" statements that his supplement contains "scientifically supported" or "clinically validated" amounts of branch-chained amino acids in the "optimal" (whatever that may be) ratio of 2:1:1, 3:1:1, 4:1:1, 8:1:1, ... and all the other variations that appear to be limited only by the patent applications and lawyers of the financially more potent players in the business. From a scientific perspective, however, this "optimal" amount has still to be elucidated - at least to my knowledge, no respectable scientist has yet claim...
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7.5g Additional Leucine per Day Alone Do Not Seem To Do the Trick. No Effect on Glycemic Control or Body Composition in 6 Month Trial

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The beneficial effects of leucine on the protein synthesis signaling cascade have been a recurring topic in the past months. A recent study from the Top Institute Food and Nutrition in the Netherlands ( Leenders. 2011 ), which is going to be published in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Nutrition, took up on findings from rodent studies, which showed distinct effects of leucine supplementation on both insulin secretion and body composition and investigated the effect of 6 month supplementation with 3 x 2.5g supplemental leucine (with meals) on body composition, muscle fiber characteristics, muscle strength, glucose homeostasis, and basal plasma amino acid and lipid concentrations in a group of 60 elderly males with type 2 diabetes (age, 71 ± 1 y; BMI, 27.3 ± 0.4 kg/m(2)). Figure 1: Chemical structure of leucine. Other than they had expected, Leenders et al. did not find any significant influence (positive or negative) of leucine supplementation on the parameters they eva...
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Its Never Too Late for A Good Steak: Resistance Exercise + 340g Lean Beef Double Muscle Fractional Synthesis Rate in Young and Old

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While this is not part of the statistic, my Blogger account provides, I assume that most of you, the students of the SuppVersity, are way below the golden ages of 60+. Yet, even if this is the case, everyone will have a parent, a grand parent, friends or acquaintances, who have a few more years under their belts and begin to complain about little aches and pains. Now, you have good news for these people : They may well avoid many of these maladies by maintaining or even building new muscle mass, if they just follow the same simple principles, of which I hope you already adopted them. Work out & eat healthy with a focus on high quality protein sources to boost protein synthesis and stop protein breakdown. Figure 1: It's beyond me, why one would even question the value of a mouth-watering piece of beef? (photograph by Michael C. Berch (User:MCB) on 2006-11-25, Wikipedia ) A very recent study from the University of Texas ( Paddon-Jones. 2011 ), where a "quality protein...
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BCAA Ward Off Body Fat Gain on Hypercaloric High Fat Diet: Branch-Chained Amino Acid Feeding Triggers Favorable Metabolic Changes in Diet-Induced Obese Mice.

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When it comes to BCAA products, stick to the basics. There is a reason nature has them in the 2:1:1 ratio. Science is more and more beginning to realize that the oversimplified "calories in vs. calories out" concept is hardly able to explain weight gain and loss in the ever-increasing number of obese individuals throughout the world. The findings of a relatively recent study from Oita University , Japan ( Arakava. 2011 ) underline the importance of a paradigm-shift in nutritional counseling from dietary advice that is based on caloric value towards concepts accounting for the different signaling cascades various macro- (protein, fats, carbohydrates) and micro-nutrients (vitamins, minerals, polyphenols, etc.) trigger. What the scientists found was that mice, who were fed a hypercaloric high fat (45%) diet for 6 weeks, gained significantly less weight, if their drinking water was enriched with BCAA s in the course of the last 2 weeks. The BCAA-treated group gained al...
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