SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Image 1: Cobalt - certainly not what you would expect to see at a health food store or pharmacy; with Kawakami et al.'s study this may change in the future (img Alchemist-hp ) "We are living in a toxic world!" - you have probably heard or read this sentence more than once and while I cannot deny that the environmental load of, among others, heavy metals appears to be increasing, I can however tell you that, according to a recent study from scientists from the Tukushima Bunri University in Japan, exposure to some of those heavy metals produces quite unexpected results in a rodent model of the metabolic syndrome and in lean controls. Instead of making them gain weight even more rapidly, the "toxic" (maybe we will have to reconsider that, just as we did in the case of chromium) heavy metal cobalt did not only reduce the weight of the white adipose tissue of the rodents, it increased leptin, adiponectin, and HDL-cholesterol, as well, and thusly "may have ...

Image 1: "Please Dr. Andro tell me I can keep taking my essential multivitamin! I am just too busy to eat healthy..." I must admit that I feel kind of awkward as I am about to defend one of those supplements, I consider to be the most dispensable within the dietary regimen of a physical culturist: the so-called multi-vitamin! In essence these small, and lately more often than not large pills do not even fall into the category supplement. With dose-equivalents way beyond what you would actually need, "multivitamins" are not even "replacements" , they are madness or, I should say, the mad outgrowth of the prevalent "more is more" mentality that is beginning to harm us on every level of our society... but I am digressing, here. Let's take a look at the actual study which brought about such an upheaval in the supplement-addicted health community on the Internet. Dietary Supplements and Mortality Rate in Older Women Image 2: Is this yo...

Image 1: Just in case you didn't listen to Adelfo on SHR , last week - he is still single, ladies! Another week, another Thursday; and although I suppose that more of you have been waiting for Adelfo's update than for my humble thoughts on the latest anti-multivitamin campaign... ah, I mean respectable research on multivitamins ;-), I just wanted to let you know that I am at it. Expect the second installment of the follow-up on " Ask Dr. Andro: Are Supplements Bad For Me (1/2) " either tomorrow or on Saturday... fortunately, future pro-wheelchair bodybuilders like Adelfo Cerame appear to be more reliable than muddle-headed pro-physicists , who spent most of their free-time either in the gym or blogging away on exercise and nutrition science. So, "now, without further delay, let's get to" (I bet some of you will recognize this slogan ;-) Adelfo's third week of what I believe is going to be his last contest prep as an amateur *thumbs up!* Adelfo ...

Image 1: Susan Kokesh, blogger and the Crazy Running Mum at the Sierra Nevada ultra-endurance run a 52.4 miles "double marathon"   in September 2010; I probably would not even have survived this torture - respect! As a health conscious physcial culturist, you are probably aware that the vitaminesque nutrient CoQ10, which, due to its ubiquitous presence in all living beings, is also known as ubiqinone , plays a fundamental role in cellular bioenergetics . It is a necessary cofactor in the mitochondrial electron transport chain (i.e. your cell's way of "breathing", its respiratory chain) and is therefore essential for the production of ATP, the fundamental energy unit your cells are operating on. In that, CoQ10 works as a mobile redox agent that shuttles electrons and, interestingly, also protons (those little blue and red balls from Bohr's atom model ;-) in the electron transport chain. Within the health and fitness community, it is however better known...

Image 1: As it turns out it's not necessary you start eating parasites (img nepaliproducts.com) In view of the public attention adaptogens have gotten, ever since everyone is self-diagnosing him- / herself with "Central Fatigue Syndrom", I assume you will be aware that the parasitic fungus, Cordyceps sinensis (CS) that is found on larvae of Lepidoptera , and has been used for centuries in traditional Chines medicine as a tonic, has lately been marketed as powerful modulator of the hypothalamus-thyroid-pituitary axis (HTPA) . Extracts from cordyceps have in fact been shown to have various biological and pharmacological actions on the liver, the kideys, the endocrine and the vascular system. It appears to stimulate erythropeoiesis (production of red blood cells) and haemopoiesis (formation of blood cellular compounds), and it exhibits immunomodulatory and anti-tumor activities. Within the health and fitness community Cordyceps sinensis has yet been touted a...

Image 1: This little bugger obviously has too little inflammation going on ;-) Are you "on fire"? Inflammation has been implicated as the root cause of almost all modern disease: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, you name it. Soothing the flames via natural and supplemental anti-oxidants has thusly been proposed and marketed as a solution for many of the aforementioned health problems. Yet, despite tons of vitamins, anti-oxidants and all the other "healthy" stuff we are taking and consuming on a daily basis, the number of morbidly obese people, diabetics and heart attack patients appears to be ever-increasing... how can that be? A possible answer to that question comes from scientists from the Saha Cardiovascular Research Center at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine in Lexington, Kentucky, US ( Findeisen. 2011 ) - we simply got everything wrong ! The observation that insulin resistance and beta-cell dysfunction usually occur in...

Image 1: It may be more effective than your usual "eat half as much diet", but even with intermittent fasting exercise is compulsory, not facultative. In the last installments of this series we have analyzed the natural interplay between AMPK and mTOR , have learned that chronic over-expression of either of the two can be detrimental to the way you look, feel and perform and have scratched on the surface of how intermittent fasting and the use of AMPK and/or mTOR promoting supplements can restore and amplify the natural up and down on the AMPK/mTOR seesaw and thus promote fat loss and and gains in lean body mass - not at the same time, but cyclically. In this episode it is high time to take a closer look on how exercise, the one and only true "body recompositioning agent" , plays into this. Tell me who you are and I tell you how your body will respond to exercise. What we already know is that the exercise induced depletion of intra-cellular ATP and the ...