SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Yes, white bread can be the healthier choice. Whether your post-prandial glycemic response will improve or deteriorate with white vs. whole-grain sourdough bread appears to be fully dependent on your gut bugs. Even though it has gotten a bad rep over the past 20 years, bread is (still?) consumed daily by billions of people, worldwide. I guess that's also because the scientific evidence of which the Internet gurus will tell you that it would "prove that bread is the devil" is by no means unambiguous. It was thus high time for scientists to perform a randomized crossover trial like the one by Talk Korem and colleagues from the Weizmann Institute of Science  - a study that used data from two 1-week-long dietary interventions comprising consumption of either traditionally made sourdough-leavened whole-grain bread or industrially made white bread. Review older articles about the gut - health  axis.at the SuppVersity Bugs Dictate What You Crave Sweeteners & Y...

Regular wheat (left) and khorasan (right) look almost alike, well, if we go by the reputation of "lighter = unhealthier", the healthy "paleo wheat" would actually look like the worse choice, but studies show, it is the exact opposite. You all know that cardiovascular Disease (CVD) causes approximately one-third of all deaths globally in both developed and developing countries. In fact, coronary Heart Disease is the largest contributor of CVD, and encompasses Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS), which is an acute pathology associated with atherosclerotic plaque rupture and interruption of coronary blood to myocardial tissue. As Whittaker et al. point out in the prelude to their latest article in the Open Access journal nutrients,  patients with ACS are at particularly high risk of both fatal and non-fatal recurrent cardiovascular events despite stringent medical therapies (Whittaker. 2015). Learn more about the effects of your diet on your health at the SuppVers...

From a paper in the Journal of Cereal Science : Histological structure of wheat grain showing bioactive components which are related to the fiber fraction of wheat and are present in whole meal but absent in refined flour. (Brouns. 2013). A recent study from the CSIRO Food Futures National Research Flagship and the University of Adelaide says: The data indicate that many adult Australians are consciously avoiding consumption of wheat foods, predominantly without any formal diagnosis. Reported symptoms suggest a physiological but not allergenic basis to this behavior. Can this be? Can your "gluten intolerance" really be in your head? Certainly it can, it's what scientists call a nocebo effect: A situation, where a harmless substance taken by a patient is associated with harmful effects due to negative expectations or the psychological condition of the patient. But wheat is no harmless substance, right? Certainly not. At least not for those people who suffer fro...

This is not your average protein shoot-out - the amount of leucine and the mTOR and protein synthetic response were not even measured. It's actually rare to read the phrease "in contrast to previous studies" in a study about whey protein. There have been dozens,... ah, what do I see, hundreds of studies that have investigated almost all aspects of the biochemical, digestive, and health properties of whey proteins and still, there it is: The sentence-starter "in contrast to previous studies" in a paper that's about to be published in one of the upcoming issues of the Journal of Proteome Research . The proteome, by the way, is the entire set of proteins expressed by a genome, cell, tissue or organism at a certain time and a study that compares the acute differential effects between whey isolate, cod and gluten (=wheat) protein on postprandial amino acid, and lipid levels, as well as other metabolites is not what I would be looking for in this journal. ...

Unless you got the right, i.e. breast milk as a baby and have rendered your gut "gluten proof" - being breast fed, when you are first exposed (or being exposed later in life) has after all been suggested as a protective factor (Farrell. 2005) This is not going to be a long post; and still, at least for some of you it is going to be an important post. A post that may have the potential to change your life for the better or for the worse depending on whether you actually suffer from gluten-intolerance or have simply been bamboozeled by the "gluten is the devil" messages that are plastered all over the Internet these days. Actually, I would hope that you belong to neither of the groups and can thus simply ignore this post. For the unfortunate rest, I have prepared a mini-summary of the results of a recent study from the Immunosciences Lab in Los Angeles (Vojdani. 2013) Milk and cornflakes - a killer combo A couple of recent studies, as well as reports from p...

Saffron-rye breads? Not necessary, if you can achieve the same beneficial effects with nothing but rye bread alone. The World Health Organization estimates that the diabetic population will increase from 195 to 360 million people by 2030 (4.5% of the global population; Wild. 2004; Shaw. 2010). Needless to say that it would be a real problem for a whole industry, if these prognoses did not come true. Against that background, it may not be such a problem that the results Bajerska et al. report in their recent paper in the Journal of Medicinal Food show that Saffron is not an uberpotent super-antidiabetic. What is however pretty interesting is the fact that the pharma- and the corn-industry could actually have a common interested in the world being fed wheat instead of rye bread. Rye + Safron is not better than rye alone When they were trying to come up with another (dys-)functional food, the researchers from the Poznan University of Life Sciences in Poland speculated that the ...

Before the profound weight loss (A) you don't see any of the glucose sucking and fad burning brown fat depots (black spots in B) on the neck of the in (B) 'foermerly obese', now only 'overweight' subject (also take a look at how the visceral fat in the abdominal region in (A) is actually pushing the organs upwards; img Vijgen. 2012) Those of you who have listened to yesterday's show will have noticed that despite its flow the number of things you can discuss in a 1h podcast is simply very limited, to say the least. This is also why these Friday posts are probably never going to be simple summaries of the SuppVersity Science Round Up of the day before. The same is true for today and still I decided not to use the allegedly lame logo I did for the first two installments, but provide you with some 'real science' evidence of the absence of brown adipose tissue on the obese and it's magical reappearance after shedding 100lbs+ subsequent to a ga...