SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

If Yap et al. were right and only continuous and not accumulative physical activity mattered, activity trackers like the this would be useless. No one needs a device to remind him of the 30 min of brisk walking he did / skipped today. In today's installment of SuppVersity " On Short Notice ", we're going to take a closer look at a selection of recent papers from the European Journal of Applied Physiology . To be more specific, I will discuss the physiological and psychological effects of dietary nitrate and their potential significance for team athletes. From there we're taking a detour to glycogen resynthesis and its interaction with hydration - a topic that may be highly relevant for bodybuilders and at least interesting for everyone else. Before we then take a departing look at the differential effects of 5x10, 10x10 and endurance exercise on markers of protein synthesis and glucose uptake, we'll spend briefly review the claim that the cumulative physic...

How large is the impact of not being active on childhood, adolescent and adult obesity. Plus: Are there critical time periods in gestation, infancy childhood and adolescence? You may have heard the claim that "fat cells form during childhood and puberty and stay forever" before, right? Well, if that's the case it would be logical to assume that our childhood may be a critical developmental windows in which we have the time-limited opportunity to shape or help shape our own or our kids body composition for the rest of our or their lives. Scientists from Mater Health Services South Brisbane,  the University College of London,  and the  Griffith University  have now reviewed the relatively scarce experimental and abundant observational pertinent research in order to examine "the role of physical activity during periods of risk to reduce the probability of obesity onset and maintenance in adulthood" (Street. 2015). Reduced obese individuals and other things...

If we take the study at hand as a bench-mark, it appears as if you cannot really recommend PA supplements to serious gymrats. Due to a bunch of short-comings and a lot of open questions, I have to caution you not to jump to preliminary & potentially flawed conclusions. If you are a "regular" here, at the SuppVersity, you will have heard about the mTOR-promoting effects of  Phosphatidic Acid (PA)  before ( learn more ). If you've also been following the SV News on Facebook , you will also know that I have repeatedly highlighted that we need studies that go beyond the mere provision of phosphatidic acid to mouse or man and assess whether adding  PA to whey will ameliorate the whey-protein induced increases in protein synthesis, muscle and strength gains. Why would that be important if we do have studies that indicate that PA is effective? Well, anyone who even remotely considers paying the $$$ for a PA product will already be taking whey protein. If adding PA o...

The good thing about paleo is that you can eat a broad range of foods. An advantage that makes paleo versatile and tasty enough to adhere to. I know that I will probably have annoyed some of you by implicitly calling "paleo" non-scientific. If we are honest, though, the whole paleo concept is based on extrapolating data from modern hunter gatherer populations, infusing them with a minimal amount of real evidence of what our ancestors ate and mixing that with the intrinsically flawed assumption that the way our ancestors ate (which was 100% opportunistic and 0% "optimized") was the optimal way for us to eat... and no, I am not going to apologize for what some of you may consider an assault on respected scientists who have published more than a dozen of papers which constitute the theoretical backbone of an experimentally still mostly unverified, but promising approach to "healthy dieting". Meat is an essential part of the "paleo diet" | Lea...