Nutrition

Foods to Improve Gut Health

Submitted by RonnyT on Wed, 2021-03-31 09:16

New research has shown that certain gut bacteria can play a significant role in the accumulation of visceral fat (aka belly fat, or the hidden fat which surrounds your organs like the liver and intestines). The bacteria in your gut help you digest food, and specific diet nutrients and gut bacteria affect the accumulation of fat in different ways. For example, protein and cholesterol were shown to be associated with increased visceral fat, however, Fiber, Magnesium and Vitamin E tend to be linked with lower visceral fat. Essentially, the food you eat can influence which microbes stay in your gut, which in turn can have an effect on how much visceral fat you have.

Maintenance - Harder Than Dieting?

Submitted by RonnyT on Tue, 2021-03-23 12:32

With summer coming just around the corner, bodybuilders, gym rats, and even the average person is trying to get in their best shape – and for most, that means dialing in to lose a few extra pounds. Most people have attempted to intentionally lose weight and go on a diet for some period. After reaching that goal, whether it be a major weight loss or just a minor tune up, you may be asking yourself, what next?

Heavy marketed protein powder ..some facts

Submitted by RonnyT on Sat, 2014-02-01 11:34

 

If we would take a native from a primitive country and would take him to a supermarket and tell him that everything he saw in the shelves was food. That that box filled with powder was soup. He would not understand. And neither should we, because we have grown to believe that the chemical dead powder in that colorful box IS soup, just add some water and you end up ?? With what??

Everyone that follows my blogposts at JuicedMuscle and previously at BodyOfScience and BodyPage knows that I believe in genuine nutrition and products. I wrote about highly processed foods here: //www.juicedmuscle.com/jmblog/content/processed-food

Now I would like to take a closer look at the sweetheart of bodybuilders, fitnessers and dieters, called PROTEIN POWDERS.

Energy drinks

Submitted by RonnyT on Thu, 2014-01-16 12:18

I don’t think a critical blog post about the “dangers” of energy drinks will scare away a hard core bodybuilder using a stack of AAS, slin and GH. Not to mention the pain killers and other ancillaries. I also posted a few times about the scaremongering of the authorities and the medical community. But this is different. This is a blog post not only written for the hard-core or advanced bodybuilder, but also for the younger members of our forum.

The more advanced bodybuilders will use stronger means to reach their goals such as the ECA-stack or Clenbuterol and T3 to cut or get energy. And most of the guys I know have some coffee before hitting the gym. In this light an energy drink could do also.

Then why this blog post?  Energy drinks can be a benefit if consumed with common sense, but it turns out that these nice colorful cans are addiction forming. Just like many people who practically “live“ on coffee, nowadays many people start to do the same with these energy drinks. I know that relatively the dangers of energy drinks are nothing comparable to other compounds people abuse.

But let’s look at it at a different angle. Some people use AAS and other compounds in a cycle to gain extra muscle mass. If done on a knowledgeable  cycle  and followed by a proper PCT, then health problems should be controllable  . We all know that if we follow the hard-core or pro protocol, which means, year round usage and much higher doses and much more different means to counteract all the injuries and pain of pushing your body to the limit, will do much more damage.  It’s true for most compounds that exert a certain effect in the body, if it is alcohol, recreational drugs, anabolic steroids or caffeine , one need to increase the dosage as the body builds up tolerance to the chemical. Therefore, it takes more and more  to produce the desired effects.

If some member mentions on the board that he wants to take oral steroid, many other members warn him and tell him to take liver protectors like Milk Thistle.  If you want to do an Oral Only Cycle, I always advise to limit the time of the cycling to max 12 weeks , DON’T use recreational drugs, prescription medicine, alcohol, try not to smoke etc. Because it’s not wise to stack all unhealthy habits.  

Betaine aka TMG

Submitted by RonnyT on Tue, 2013-10-29 11:46

Another new supplement hyped by the supplement industry. Everybody that saw the documentary “Bigger - Stronger – Faster” knows that this industry sells dreams. But most guys fall for the nice adds, the science backed “evidence” and the pictures of athletes pumped up by anabolic steroids (…and a lot of other “illegal means” ) that REALLY work wonders on your appearance, telling you this supplement is responsible for their gains.

Does this mean ALL supplements and ergogenic means are worthless? Nope ..we all know by now that Creatine has a (modest) effect. And many athletes use it also while on a juice stack. You also know that most of us use silymarin (Milk thistle) to protect our liver. We use whey proteins, because they are much more comfortable to use then chickenbreasts. It’s just that you should put it in perspective and realize that all those supplement companies want to sell you their products. Most magazines just exist because supplement-companies pay a lot of money for advertisements. In the gym the gym-owner sells you these supplements or a whey shake after you are finished training. And we, writers of articles on bodybuilding, often work for supplement companies, that also run magazines, websites and web-shops. Naps doesn’t. So my unbiased opinion.

salt-sodium in bodybuilding

Submitted by RonnyT on Mon, 2013-04-01 11:42

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.

Processed food

Submitted by RonnyT on Fri, 2012-12-21 16:46

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.

Is sugar toxic?

Submitted by RonnyT on Sun, 2012-11-18 20:18

A story by GARY TAUBES Published on April 13, 2011 in the New York Times

On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.

Lustig is a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, which is one of the best medical schools in the country. He published his first paper on childhood obesity a dozen years ago, and he has been treating patients and doing research on the disorder ever since.

The viral success of his lecture, though, has little to do with Lustig’s impressive credentials and far more with the persuasive case he makes that sugar is a “toxin” or a “poison,” terms he uses together 13 times through the course of the lecture, in addition to the five references to sugar as merely “evil.” And by “sugar,” Lustig means not only the white granulated stuff that we put in coffee and sprinkle on cereal — technically known as sucrose — but also high-fructose corn syrup, which has already become without Lustig’s help what he calls “the most demonized additive known to man.”

Isotonic drinks

Submitted by RonnyT on Sat, 2012-11-03 13:54

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.

Chocolate healthy and anabolic

Submitted by RonnyT on Mon, 2012-08-27 14:13

Have you had your flavonoids today?

While not a question normally asked at a social gathering, flavonoids have become quite a hot topic in the media and in scientific journals.

Flavonoids help protect plants by shielding them from environmental toxins and helping repair damage. When we consume plant-based foods rich in flavonoids, it appears that we also benefit from this “antioxidant” power. Antioxidants are believed to help the body's cells resist damage caused by free radicals that are formed by normal bodily processes such as breathing and from environmental contaminants like cigarette smoke. When the body lacks adequate levels of antioxidants, damage from free radicals occurs and leads to increases in LDL (“bad)-cholesterol oxidation (oxidized LDL-cholesterol hurts the arteries) and plaque formation on the walls of the arteries.

Flavanols are the main type of flavonoid found in cocoa and chocolate. In addition to having antioxidant qualities, research indicates that flavanols have other positive influences on vascular health, such as lowering blood pressure and improving blood flow to the brain and heart, making blood platelets less sticky and able to clot, and lowering cholesterol.