Category: Research
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OTC Pill
Last week the FDA approved the first over the counter birth control pill (Belluck et al., 2023), which is expected to be widely utilized and increase use of hormonal birth control by teenagers among other demographics. The New York Times article went on to say that the manufacturer even plans to offer ways for people…
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Caffeine and Exercise
Bridge et al. (2006) reported on a randomized controlled trial testing the effect of caffeine vs. placebo on for competitive runners on an 8 km race. They were given either 3 mg per kg of their body mass of caffeine, or a placebo capsule consisting of 3 mg per kg body mass of glucose, one…
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Glycogen Replenishment
A strategy referred to as “sleep low-train low” involves scheduling carbohydrate intake around the training schedule so that some, but not all, workouts are performed in a state where the muscles do not have maximum glucose available to do the work. Several randomized trials with trained male athletes have investigated the effects of this strategy…
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Carnitine and Fatigue
L-carnitine is important for energy production, and a study found that supplementing with l-carnitine reduced symptoms of fatigue in some people with hypothyroidism (An et al., 2016). The dosage used in the study was 990 mg twice a day for twelve weeks. A few people experienced minor side effects like nausea and discomfort. When…
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Beer and Exercise
A randomized controlled trial by de Moraes Pontes et al. (2022) asked whether drinking a beer after an exercise session would influence the recovery trajectory of the participants’ heart rate variability as control of the heart rate shifts from the sympathetic nervous system back to the parasympathetic resting state. The authors cite quite a few…
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Dietary Fiber for IBS
There is an article on dietary considerations for IBS (Algera et al., 2019) that you might find interesting. The authors of this article extracted the findings from all the English-language research studies in the PubMed database on IBS and diet and wrote them up in a chronological summary describing the evolution of recommendations from 1977…
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Microbiome of Depression
Szabo de Edelenyi et al. (2021) wanted to begin testing the hypothesis that eating more fruits and vegetables would lower the amount of indole produced by gastrointestinal bacteria, resulting in a reduced risk for depression. They selected a sample of 2,054 women ages 45-65 from within the participants of a larger prospective cohort study called…
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Methylation
James et al. (2004) looked at metabolites of methylation in the blood of 20 autistic children and compared them with a control group of 33 healthy children. They found that the autistic children had lower S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) and higher S-adenosylhomocysteine (SAH) compared to the control group (indicating impaired methylation), with the ratio of SAM to…
