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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You get through at least a kilogram of raw carrots every day; the whites of your eyes and your skin have turned yellow; and you panic if you discover that your carrot supply has dried up. If you recognise these symptoms, you are probably addicted to raw carrots. It’s rare but it does occur. A Czech psychiatrist described three cases two decades ago.

When Ludek Zerny, a Prague psychiatrist working at a psychiatric clinic, did a literature search to see if anything was known about an unusual form of addiction that he’d stumbled across, he discovered articles on ‘hypercarotenemia’. This phenomenon refers to people whose diet contains such large quantities of carotenoids such as beta-carotene, alpha-carotene, beta-cryptoxanthin, lycopene, lutein and zeaxanthin that their skin turns orange.

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Eating low carb is the fastest way to improve your health and your body composition. Although low carb is becoming increasingly popular, it is not a new concept.

In 1939 Westin A. Price wrote Nutrition and Physical Degeneration after traveling all over the world, studying the diets and nutritional habits of numerous cultures. He concluded that once these cultures adopted aspects of the modern Western diet (particularly flour, sugar and modern processed vegetable fats), nutritional deficiencies followed, causing dental issues and many health problems such as diabetes, gout, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

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