Athletes will benefit more and faster from a beta-alanine supplement [structural formula shown here, above] if they take the amino acid during meals. Sports scientists at Ghent University in Belgium discovered that taking the supplement during a meal leads to a faster increase in carnosine [structural formula shown here, below] concentration in the muscles than when it’s taken between meals.

The dipeptide carnosine neutralises the acids that are formed in the muscles during intensive physical exercise. The more carnosine there is in your muscle cells, the longer you can continue your exertions for. And that’s interesting for athletes.

The body makes carnosine by attaching the amino acids histidine and beta-alanine to each other. The body has an ample supply of histidine, but not of beta-alanine. That’s why beta-alanine supplementation is a good strategy for jacking up the carnosine levels in the muscle cells.

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The faster you eat, the more difficult it is for the hormone insulin to do its work in your body. That means that fewer nutrients reach your muscles, and probably that more get deposited in your fat reserves. In the long term this leads to a much higher chance of developing diabetes type-2.

We’ve extracted these words of wisdom from a small epidemiological study published recently by endocrinologists at the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences in Clinical Nutrition. The researchers collected data on 234 people who had recently been diagnosed as having diabetes type-2. They compared these data with data on 468 people who did not have diabetes.

One of the questions the researchers asked the participants was about the speed with which they generally ate their meals. If they compared themselves with other people at the same table, did they eat faster? Or at the same speed? Or more slowly?

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Bodybuilders and other athletes who do weight training a couple of times a week build up muscle best if they take a portion of protein every three hours during the day. Dividing the portions in this way works better than taking protein every hour and a half or every six hours. Researchers at Nestle write about it in Nutrition & Metabolism.

Nutritionists need no convincing: strength athletes make faster progress if they consume more protein. There’s less known however about the effect of different sorts of protein and the effects of the intervals at which the protein is ingested. Daniel Moore, a nutritionist at the Nestle Research Centre in Lausanne, Switzerland and at the University of Guelph in Canada, is interested in the latter subject.

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If you’re suffering from flu, or youve just had a vaccination against a nasty bacteria or unpleasant virus, then supplementation with the amino acid proline [structural formula shown here] can give your immune system a boost. At least, that’s what you’d expect after reading the results of the animal study by scientists at the Chinese ministry of agriculture that’s about to be published in Amino Acids.

Proline is not an essential amino acid. It is found in gelatin, but your body also makes it by converting L-ornithine. Nevertheless, proline is an important amino acid. It plays a key role in the healing of wounds and the functioning of the immune system. The latter aspect caught the attention of the Chinese.

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According to sports supplement manufacturers, creatine malate makes athletes stronger and faster, but not heavier. The latter claim is true backed up in a study done by researchers at the University School of Physical Education in Krakow, Poland. But for the other claims the Poles, who used judokas as test subjects, found no proof.

Creatine malate is not a chemical compound, but a mixture of two substances: creatine [above right] and malate [above left]. According to supplements manufacturers, muscle cells absorb the creatine in creatine malate better, and creatine malate users don’t retain fluid. Whether this is indeed so, we don’t know. There are publications that would suggest this is the case, but they are in the Polish scientific media and remain inaccessible to us.

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If you’re searching for bargains on the steroids market, you may come across some dirt-cheap pills and bottles from Biotech Pharmaceuticals. Don’t buy them immediately is our advice. Check first what they contain according to analyses done by the Italian Istituto Superiore di Sanite… or rather what they don’t contain…

According to the labels Biotech Pharmaceuticals is based in Sydney, Australia, but their products turn up everywhere. Below is a row of shots of Biotech Pharmaceuticals Oxandrolone. They come from DutchBodybuilding.com. [dutchbodybuilding.com 16 October 2012]

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Lots of athletes like to train to music. That’s not so surprising, as music banishes fatigue and reduces pain, facts that have been known since Aristotle. But in 2001 the Japanese endocrinologist Hajime Fukui published the results of a study that might cause you to wonder if there isn’t another side to the coin when it comes to training with music. Fukui discovered that music lowers testosterone levels, in men at least.

Fukui, who works at the Nara University of Education, did an experiment with seventy students aged from 19-25. Half of the students were women and half were men. Fukui got them all to listen to music for 30 minutes.

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Cardio training makes your blood vessels healthier. Raising your heart rate rejuvenates the epithelium layer of the walls of your blood vessels. This process of rejuvenation is helped not only by training, but also by taking curcumin [structural formula shown here], researchers at the University of Tsukuba in Japan discovered.

Curcumin is the primary active ingredient in turmeric. It has a broad range of positive health effects. Curcumin has an anabolic/anticatabolic effect in muscle tissue, it inhibits the conversion of amino acids into energy, it protects the prostate against androgens, boosts the blood vessel widening effect of NO – and may also possibly slow the rate at which your hair turns grey. Not bad.

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