Individuals differ in their propensity to store fat in the abdominal area versus other parts of the body. There is evidence that intra-abdominal fat stores are easier to get rid of than fat stores in the hips, buttocks, thighs and arms.
Japanese researchers recently investigated whether obese individuals with a high propoensity to store fat [...]

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Curcumin is a pigment in the spice tumeric. Researchers from Tufts University recently investigated the effects of a curcumin-supplemented diet on body fat levels and weight gain in mice. We’re not sure what it was about curcumin that made them think it was worth testing in this way, but their hunch proved correct. Mice fed [...]

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Vitamin D has been much in the news recently and is a hot topic in medical and nutritional research. Recent studies have implicated vitamin D deficiency in connection with a host of diseases and health conditions, including some cancers. Scientists also now believe that vitamin D deficiency is far more widespread than was previously [...]

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Beta-hydroxy-beta-methylbutyrate, or HMB, is a nutritional supplement that is popular among weightlifters. Early research on HMB found that it enhanced the muscle size and strength gains resulting from weightlifting, but most subsequent research on HMB has observed no benefit. Researchers from New Zealand’s Massey University recently published a review that sought to determine whether the [...]

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When Timothy Noakes first proposed that exercise fatigue is regulated by the brain in the early 1990s, most of his fellow exercise physiologists thought he was crazy. Since then, however, evidence in favor of Noakes’s hypothesis has been piling up.
Some of the most interesting recent evidence comes from research on sports drinks showing that [...]

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A new book entitled The Skinny, by New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Comprehensive Weight Loss Program director Louis J. Aronne, is getting a lot of attention. It can be categorized among the new satiety-based diet plans, such as Volumetrics, by Barbara Rolls, PhD. Aronne’s book proposes that refined carbohydrates and foods that are high [...]

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Inflammation of body fat tissue is a major contributor to components of metabolic syndrome, including insulin resistance. A high-fat diet is known to increase fat tissue inflammation. Researchers from the University of Illinois recently studied the independent and combined effects of exercise and a low-fat diet on mice previously fed a high-fat diet. Mice were [...]

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Brown fat has been in the news lately thanks to three new studies on the subject published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Brown fat was once thought to exist only in infants, but it is now known that many adults retain very small amounts of it. The function of brown fat is to [...]

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Cystine and thyanine are amino acids that are known to support immune function. Since heavy exercise training loads tend to suppress immune function and increase the risk of contracting viral infections, a team of Japanese researchers decided recently to test the effects of cystine and thyanine supplementation on runners during a period of intense training. [...]

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Take this one with a grain of salt, as the study was performed by a commercial laboratory funded by the makers of the very products it tests and it was done in Japan, where every test of a potentially ergogenic supplement seems to produce positive results, and the particular result obtained in this case has [...]

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