Articles

In ancient times, salt was precious. It was traded as the most valued of all commodities, and having a good supply of salt was as close to life insurance as you could get. Age-old aphorisms like "salt of the earth" and "worth your salt" remind us how important salt has always been.

Life insurance of the ancient world.

So all the modern-day phobias surrounding salt and sodium seems to present us with a paradox: how could something so vital to survival in one era be considered so deadly in another?

The answer may surprise you. The anti-sodium campaign actually began as a commercial movement to sell different foods and snacks, under the guise of being healthier. Much like the low-fat movement, manufacturers care more about selling products than they do about scientific accuracy.

As soon as the low-sodium content advertisements were shown to create dividends, other food and supplement companies followed suit, to the point where consumers started to believe that low-sodium was good, and salt, in general, was bad. People failed to see that they had been internalizing advertising, not actual scientific information.

Sciroxx – Long-Arm of Steroid Law Enforcement Takes Interest

This article is written by Millard Baker, but i want to pepost it here to add some sidenotes. For our book "Underground Anabolics" I mailed with all UG Labs involved and received much inside information from the labowners. some is allready posted here  //juicedmuscle.com/jmblog/content/genxxl-axio-syntrop-biogen-and-their-offspring

Two men involved in the domestic distribution of Sciroxx-brand anabolic steroids have pleaded guilty in the United States District Court in Providence. Edmond Paolucci and Patrick Cunningham admitted responsibility for importing bulk quantities of steroids and ancillary drugs, repackaging them in retail-size units with the Sciroxx label and shipping them to customers in the United States.

Paolucci received 650-milliliter jugs containing injectable testosterone enanthate, boldenone undecylenate and trenbolone acetate and bulk quantities of oral steroid tablets. He also received prescription ancillary drugs such as Pregnyl (hCG), T3, Arimidex (anastrozole), Teva tamoxifen and Serpafar clomiphene from Turkey and Bulgaria. The steroids were shipped to various postal boxes scattered throughout Rhode Island, Massachusets and Connecticut.

The idea of steroid vacations is not new. For our magazine we wrote about Turkey - Croatia etc. Also countries like Thailand (Dennis James) and Mexico where extremely popular in the early 2000.  An article in "The Age" called "Following the steroid trail" was the beginning of the end for Australian based brands like Jurox, RWR etc branched in Mexico. Again an Australian newpaper  runs a story about steroids including some idiotic phrases from "steroid experts" . They don't really care about pedophiles floating tese countries, but rather choose to criminalise users of, in this country, perfectly legal drugs. Aussies start to look like Americans who want to dominate the rules where we all have to obey...pricks..

THERE'S something about the seedy Thai beachside town of Pattaya that keeps enticing Michael Dorn back - but it's not the sun, sea, sand or sex for which the resort is famous.

The 21-year-old from Blacktown is part of a thriving amateur bodybuilding subculture that uses anabolic steroids and growth hormones as a fast track to the ultimate ''ripped'' body. While the drugs are heavily restricted in Australia by laws that are among the strictest in the world, Dorn - and hundreds like him - have discovered a novel way around the problem: they travel to Thailand on ''steroid vacations''.

A Sun-Herald investigation has found that rather than risk prosecution in Australia, everyday gym users are travelling to Asia and ''stacking'' a dangerous cocktail of steroids that include powerful veterinary drugs and fertility medicine.

While police in Australia warn of a growing trade in steroids - and are increasingly finding them during raids aimed at party drugs - health experts say the products can cause life-threatening heart and liver damage, as well as baldness and infertility.

You will read countless muscle magazines, books,  internet articles, and online message boards searching for the secret to gaining impressive muscle size. They will say things like:

“protein powder 6 times a day”,

“load up on creatine for 6 days”,

“take this amazing N.O. pre-workout supplement”,

“be sure and eat within 45 minutes of your workout”,

“never workout longer than 45 minutes”,

“eat 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight”.

The supplement advertisements will come with pictures of muscled-up monsters so you know what they say is the truth. Other articles purporting to give you the secret to gaining muscles will say “The secret is that their is no secret – it takes hard work, determination, and sacrifice“. Or “The secret is taking this combination of supplements every three hours“. What they will never tell you is the truth. The truth is that there is a secret to gaining muscle mass, an open secret, and every single person in the fitness industry, bodybuilding industry, modeling industry, film industry, advertising industry, sports industry knows it and they will never, ever tell you what it is.

Well, friends, I know the secret and I will share with you what it is. In the back of your mind you already know what the secret is, you just don’t want to believe it. The secret to gaining impressive, dense, eye-popping muscles is this:

Doping in Sports

Almost seven years after police discovered hundreds of bags of blood in a Madrid clinic during the Operacion Puerto doping investigation, Dr Eufemiano Fuentes and five others will finally go on trial, starting January 28, 2013.

Doping was not a crime in Spain at the time of the raids and so the Puerto six have been accused of crimes against public health.

Dr Fuentes himself confirmed in the media that he had worked with athletes from several sports, including tennis, athletics, boxing, football as well as cyclists. Officially closed in September 2008, Operación Puerto has been said to involve more than 200 athletes, but only  some 50 cyclists have been named as clients. It is realistic to think that other names will be named during this trial.

All this has come about from "Operation Greyhound" (Operacion Galgo) in 2009, which is the second high-profile organized effort against doping in Spain involving Fuentes. The first was Operation Mountain Pass (Operacion Puerto) in 2006, which was mostly known for having caught out a few high-profile cyclists for doping with Fuentes' aid. Now in Januari 2013 the police arrested the former cyclist José Luis Martínez for allegedly trafficking in banned performance-enhancing substances, police said that they had found more than 300,000 doses of banned substances in a secret laboratory in the southeastern town of Molina de Segura. Substances included clenbuterol, primobolan, testovis, testosterone, proviron, growth hormones, ephedrine.  This case  is linked to both major doping operations mentioned before.

Fuentes made the claim that other sports besides cycling were involved. Operation Greyhound has already shown this to be the case with the World Champ Steeplechase runner Marta Dominguez being suspended. Fuentes' statement, which implies that doping was done by the Spanish national fottbal team, could hold some truth for sure. Not just with that team but other footballers and professionals from various sports (a cyclist called Manzano claimed during the time of Operacion Puerto that he saw footballers and tennis players at the clinic).

In the media we have seen numerous articles about cyclists and cycling. We as juicers know that almost every athlete on the Olympics etc etc uses banned substances. Shooters using beta-blockers. Cycling is used as a scape goat, but during the Olympics in Australia I saw swimmers sooo obvious on growth hormones.

Its time we face the truth, there is no such thing as a “clean” sport not with all that money involved. And even before that, people will do anything to win, just google.

We as bodybuilders know that pro-bodybuilders use AAS, but an enormous amount of “cosmetic “ users also take these means. Just google the historical timeline on spots doping. Its as old as competitive sport itself.

Paleolithic diets

Do you want a bigger bulge in your biceps but no bulge in your belly? Take an old-school concept and apply it to your diet Do as that sage Greek suggested: Learn one subject through the study of another. Eat the way people used to eat before the advent of farming. Embrace old-school eating.

Along-gone, sage Greek said wise men can learn about one subject by studying a seemingly unrelated topic, and guess what? He was right. You can learn, for instance, how to get ripped and how to keep muscle by studying the lessons and lingo of basketball. Players who make no-look passes, ankle-breaking crossovers and 360-degree dunks may make the highlight reels, but these athletes don't necessarily make their teams winners. The guys who set back screens and cut back door, collect floor burns and floor-boards, take charge and charge at you are the ones who determine the outcome of games. One phrase, of high praise, is reserved for and best describes these hyperkinetic hoopsters: old school. This moniker means they play the game the way it used to be played years ago before the game went Hollywood.

According to Ray Audette, author of NeanderThin: Eat Like a Caveman to Achieve a Lean, Strong, Healthy Body and possibly the most radical proponent of what's known as Paleolithic nutrition, old-school eating means eating meat, fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts, berries, seeds and little else. No grains, beans, potatoes, dairy products or sugar are part of the caveman diet. Sound extreme? A bit excessive? Your reaction depends on your understanding of genetics and your opinion of obesity and modern disease. Most geneticists agree our genes have only been altered about one hundredth of one percent since the development of agriculture transformed the masses from hunter-gatherers to farmers. In other words our genes are 99.99 percent the same as they were 10,000 years ago; yet paleontologists know obesity and diseases such as atherosclerosis, hypertension, diabetes, osteoporosis and cancer didn't afflict hunter-gatherers, a pattern still true today in the few pockets of the world where people still subsist on the hunter-gatherer diet.

Many experts also believe an even more dramatic change in the industrialized world's eating habits 200-plus years ago -the reliance on highly processed, nutritionally compromised, packaged food rather than fresh foods - has exacerbated the above health problems. Perhaps eating like a hunter-gatherer isn't such an outlandish idea after all - especially when eating in this manner allows weightlifters to swap fat for muscle in a way not as impractical as Audette makes it seem.

How to Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer

Audette's aforementioned advice is, without a doubt, as hardcore as a 100-rep set of full front squats. He also advocates eating raw meat (if obtained from the wild and not from a supermarket), limiting consumption of fruits and vegetables, and no cheating whatsoever. "If you can't stick to the diet religiously," he writes in his book, "you are better off not adopting it at all. "He claims that once on his diet, treating yourself to a forbidden food will have an even more deleterious effect than when you ate the food regularly. His logic: "Because the immune system responds to even small doses, the smallest amount of the forbidden fruit may produce weight gains far out of proportion to their size" and make you ill. However, other proponents believe you can derive benefits from Paleolithic nutrition without being so extreme.

Adipotide

An obesity drug that 'kills' fat cells

Most weight-loss drugs help burn fat by speeding up metabolism, suppressing appetite, or both. But a new drug currently being tested on obese rhesus monkeys goes a step further: It reportedly "kills" fat cells. Researchers at the University of Texas think the drug could one day help fight obesity in humans. Here's what you should know:

During the past 20 years, there has been a dramatic increase in obesity in the United States and rates remain high. In 2010, no state in the United States had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. Approximately one in three adults and one in six children are obese. Obesity is epidemic in the United States today and a major cause of death, attributable to heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.

Processed food

Processed food fills the aisles of your favorite grocery store. With all that attractive packaging there is plenty to catch your eye.

The boring part is to turn the package over and try to read and understand the ingredients list. You have to read the ingredients with the understanding that everything might not even be included on the ingredient list. That’s because food manufacturers are not required to put everything on the list.

Every day, 7 percent of the U.S. population visits a McDonald's, and 20-25 percent eat fast food of some kind, says Steven Gortmaker, professor of society, human development, and health at the Harvard School of Public Health. As for children, 30 percent between the ages of 4 and 19 eat fast food on any given day.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Americans get processed food not only from fast-food restaurants but also from their neighborhood grocery stores. As it stands, about 90 percent of the money that Americans spend on food is used to buy--that's right--processed foods.

Are there additives designed to stimulate or induce cravings? What if ingredients in Product A and ingredients in Product B combine to cause neurological problems – what caused the problem? As you can see, consumers are at a huge disadvantage.

The FDA has a list of around 3,000 additives but the number in existence is much much higher. There are currently more than 14,000 laboratory-made chemicals added to our foods to improve quality, shelf life, flavor, and appearance.

f you are trying to build your muscles there are many types of foods you should take out of your diet. You can do it all at once or slowly eliminate the bad food items. Bodybuilding foods are rich in protein and complex carbs. When working out for muscle growth you should avoid sugary foods that contain simple sugars and refined carbohydrates.

Metformin (Glucophage) for Weight Loss and Bodybuilding

Metformin, sold under the trade name Glucophage, is used to treat diabetes, but several studies show that it also helps non-diabetics to lose weight by reducing hunger (1).

You may be overweight because your body makes too much insulin, especially if your store your fat primarily in your belly. When you eat, your blood sugar level rises. The higher it rises, the more insulin your pancreas releases. Insulin makes you fat by acting on your brain to make you hungry, your liver to manufacture fat, and the fat cells in your belly to fill with fat. So the treatment for this type of obesity is to avoid foods that cause the highest rise in blood sugar and to take medications that prevent your blood sugar levels from rising too high. Avoid bakery products, pastas and all foods made from flour, fruit juices and everything with added sugar. Eat fruits and root vegetables such as potatoes only with meals.

Isotonic drinks

There was a time when having a drink after a workout meant a beer at the club bar. Not any more. Even the humble glass of water from the gym cooler has fallen out of favour with fitness enthusiasts. These days, we are encouraged to down a bewildering array of products, from energy-replacing isotonic drink to zero-calorie flavoured water loaded with electrolytes (mineral salts) that help keep the body’s fluid levels in balance.

But does the average keep-fitter need to drink unnaturally coloured bottled drinks or mix their own potions from powder during and after their thrice-weekly turn in the gym? Last month, experts warned that thousands of gym-goers were not only wasting their money on energy sports drinks, they were expanding their waistlines, too: as many of these drinks are full of calories, the report concluded that you would actually have to train even longer or harder to prevent the excess energy from the drink itself being stored as fat.