Fitness Friday - Fitness News You Can Use (Sunday Edition)

Due to a browser crash (apparently Firefox is unstable with 100+ tabs open), this week's Fitness Friday is a couple of days late, but the posts are still fresh.

Lots of good stuff this week, including research on fat intake and body composition, garlic for a healthier prostate, impact of antioxidants on muscle growth, the many benefits of creatine, complexes for muscle fat loss, and how time under tension can increase strength and muscle size.

Weight gain? The kind of fat in your diet helps determine how much muscle mass you build up

ergo-log.com

If you gain weight, the kind of fat in your diet partly determines the amount of fat and the amount of muscle in your newfound kilograms. The unsaturated fatty acids in sunflower oil stimulate the growth of muscle; the saturated fatty acids in palm oil – found in many processed foods – lead to an increase the amount of fat. Researchers at the University of Uppsala in Sweden report on this in Diabetes. 

* * * * *

Garlic, prostate cancer and Death Receptor-4

ergo-log.com



The more leeks, onions, chives or garlic that men eat, the less likely they are to develop prostate cancer. Epidemiologists at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing discovered the prostate-cancer inhibiting properties of the Allium vegetable family when they gathered and reanalysed data from 9 big epidemiological studies. They looked at data on 132,192 men in total.

Source:
Asian Pac J Cancer Prev. 2013;14(7):4131-4.

* * * * *

Do Antioxidants Impede the Benefits of Exercise?

Breaking Muscle
Craig Marker - Contributor - Psychology and Research
More Articles from this Author
 


Antioxidants have been shown in multiple studies to impair the benefits of exercise. But newer theories of antioxidants propose that the reactive oxygen molecules thought to be so harmful actually set in motion important reactions in the body that make us stronger in the long run.

RELATED: Antioxidants Have Mixed Effects on Performance

* * * * *

Creatine: A Versatile Supplement

Brett Contreras

November 4, 2014

Creatine is one of the few supplements that has stood the test of time. I can recall first taking it when I was in high school over 20 years ago. I’m pretty sure it’s the most well-research supplement in the literature, with thousands upon thousands of articles on the topic. HERE is a Wikipedia link to creatine in case you’d like to learn the basics. Over the years, I’ve stumbled across some interesting research on creatine. I decided to compile some of these study abstracts together into an article. When sifting through the entire body of research, it seems that creatine does not enhance testosterone or growth hormone output (one study showed increased growth hormone, but several others have shown no effect), does not work as well in the elderly as it does with younger subjects, does not reduce muscle damage (one study showed that it did, but several others showed that it did not), does not improve the plasma-lipid ratio during aerobic training, and does not alter insulin sensitivity.

However, creatine does indeed lead to some very favorable outcomes. It’s also very safe and well-tolerated. In the abstracts below, you will note that creatine....

* * * * * 

Note: despite the title of this post, guys will definitely benefit from these complexes.

3 Complexes for Rapid Female Fat Loss 

by TC | 11/04/14

Here's what you need to know...

• CrossFit generates a lot of controversy, but everybody agrees that it does great things for the female body. Not interested in CrossFit? Do complexes.
• Complexes provide the same kind of exertion, the same type of fat burning and strength building, and they require very little equipment or time.
• Complexes are simply a series of movements performed with a barbell, dumbbell(s), or kettlebell(s) where you finish each rep of one movement before quickly moving onto the next movement.
• They can be done after your regular workout as a fat-burning, muscle-shaping finisher. However, they're so effective, many women would be better off replacing their entire workout with complexes.

CrossFit? No Thanks.

CrossFit has its fans and its detractors, but the one thing everyone seemingly agrees on is that the women who do it look pretty darn good.

As powerful a lure as looking pretty darn good might be to a lot of non-CrossFit women, the idea of joining a "box" probably freaks many of them out. It could be that you were never one to join sororities in college and the notion of all that rah-rah stuff and allegedly friendly competition makes you get frown lines around your mouth.

Maybe CrossFit comes off just a little bit too much like a cult and you're in no mood to give away all your worldly possessions and swear allegiance to its founder. Others might cringe at the idea of doing all those bunion-pounding sprints. Or, it could simply be that you don't know how to do some of those Olympic lifts.

If it's the last option, you're not alone. There are thousands of female (and male) bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts who can't do a proper snatch, clean and jerk, or muscle-up on gymnastic rings. Either they didn't learn how do to them in gym class, no one in a commercial gym taught them, they didn't bother to seek out a qualified coach, or they were just plain klutzy and were worried about impaling innocent bystanders.

* * * * *

Create Tension, Build More Muscle 

by James Chan | 11/05/14

Here's what you need to know...

• High mechanical tension is the primary stimulus for muscle growth. The more tension you create within a muscle, the more size you'll build.
• The tension must be long in duration, at least 20 seconds.
• The tension must also be high throughout the entire range of motion.
• Set extenders accomplish all three things – they create high tension for a long time throughout the entire range of motion.
• Set extenders are when you hit a muscle group with a series of two or more exercises done in consecutive order with little or no rest.

Why are some exercises better for developing muscular size than others? 

Ultimately, high mechanical tension is the primary stimulus for muscle growth. The more tension you can create within a muscle, the more size you'll build. To maximize muscular growth, the tension has to meet the following criteria....

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, selenium and vitamin E were being touted as the potential cure for prostate cancer. In fact, the most influential study was conducted at the University of Arizona - SELECT (the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial) - just a few miles down the road from here. The SELECT study found no benefit by the time it ended in 2008, but over the following years, they found an increased risk in men who took only the vitamin E supplement (2011):

After an average of 7 years (5.5 years on supplements and 1.5 off supplements), there were 17 percent more cases of prostate cancer in men taking only vitamin E than in men taking only placebos.

Specifically, for every 1,000 men who took placebos there were 65 cases of prostate cancer over 7 years; for every 1,000 men who took vitamin E, there were 76 cases of prostate cancer.  This difference, an absolute increase of 11 cases per 1,000 men, was statistically significant and therefore is not likely due to chance.  These results were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association October 12, 2011 (see the paper ).

Now a new study is out showing that in men who take high dose vitamin E and selenium, there is a nearly two-found risks of developing prostate cancer. This new report seems to be using the same men who participated in the SELECT study.

Via Live Science:

Selenium, Vitamin E Supplements May Double Prostate Cancer Risk

By Bahar Gholipour, Staff Writer | February 21, 2014 

 

Selenium supplements are popular, but do they work?

Men who take selenium and vitamin E supplements may increase their risk of prostate cancer, researchers have found.

The new study examined about 1,700 men with prostate cancer and 3,100 healthy men. These men had previously participated in a large trial in 2001, in which they had been randomly assigned to take either high doses of vitamin E and selenium supplements, or a placebo. Researchers had measured the amount of selenium in the men's toenails before they started taking the supplements.

Now, the results showed that selenium supplements did not benefit men who had lower levels of the element at the start of the study, and nearly doubled the risk of prostate cancer in those who had higher levels of selenium (but still within ranges common among U.S. men).

In addition, vitamin E more than doubled the risk of the most aggressive type of prostate cancer, but only among men with low selenium levels at the beginning of the study. [5 Things You Should Know About Prostate Cancer]

"Men should avoid selenium or vitamin E supplementation at doses that exceed recommended dietary intakes," Dr. Eric Klein, chairman of the Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, and his colleagues wrote in their study, published today (Feb. 21) in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The study is, in fact, a second look at a previous large, randomized trial, which aimed to investigate whether high doses of selenium and vitamin E supplements could lower a man's risk for prostate cancer, something that earlier studies had suggested.

However, that trial, which included 35,000 men, ended early with concerns that the treatments may do more harm than good. In fact, more users of vitamin E were getting prostate cancer than men who were on placebo. "Vitamins are not innocuous…they can be harmful," Klein told Live Science at the time in 2011.

The doses used in that trial were 200 micrograms of selenium and 400 international units of vitamin E. These doses are higher than most multivitamins, which contain about 50 micrograms of selenium and 30 to 200 international units of vitamin E.

Previous studies have suggested that the effects of nutrition supplements depend on how well-nourished a population is. Similarly, it is possible that the U.S. population is already getting adequately high levels of selenium through diet, and supplementing them with more selenium results in an unnaturally high amounts of the element, and has either no effect or increases cancer risk, the researchers said.

The findings also point to a complex interaction between selenium and vitamin E, the researchers said. The study showed that vitamin E increased the cancer risk in men who had low levels of selenium.

This was unexpected because both vitamin E and selenium have antioxidant roles and one could reasonably expect the opposite -- that supplemental vitamin E could compensate for an antioxidant deficit resulting from lower selenium, wrote Paul Frankel, a biostatistician at City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, in an accompanying editorial.

It is unlikely that there will be another trial looking at these supplements and their role in preventing prostate cancer, the researchers said. Given the risks and lacking evidence of benefits for other diseases, men older than 55 should avoid supplementation with either vitamin E or selenium at doses that exceed recommended dietary intakes, the researchers said.

Email Bahar Gholipour or follow her @alterwired. Follow us @LiveScience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.