SHR

Few companies would have a more vested interest in cocoa research than Mars, Inc. After all, they are ranked as America’s seventh largest private company with over $33 billion in revenue and five billion-dollar global brands – m&m’s, snickers, dove chocolate, milky way, and twix. It is therefore not surprising that they funded a recent publication in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition investigating the safety and efficiency of cocoa flavanol (CF) supplementation. Mars didn’t just fund the study though, they had four of the nine coauthors under their employment and they supplied the test materials. There is a huge conflict of interest here and strong potential for publication bias. This is why the results are all the more interesting – because they show that consuming high levels of CFs does not have any effect on healthy, middle-aged adults at a low-risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD; 10-year CVD risk of <2.5%)....

Lutein is a prevalent carotenoid in nature that plays an essential role in plant health by harvesting blue light and protecting the chloroplasts from oxidative damage. Humans and other primates are unique in that we are the only animals to selectively accumulate lutein in the retina of the eye and brain. Accumulation within the retina bestows us with a normal yellow macular pigmentation and protects the eye against blue light and oxidative damage. In what is surely the largest experimental trial to date to investigate age-related macular degeneration (AMD), supplementing lutein alongside other antioxidants reduced the progression of AMD to its advanced forms by 10% compared to the antioxidants alone. Within the brain, lutein is the most prevalent carotenoid where it is believed to be neuroprotective through its role as an antioxidant. As outlined by a team of investigators from three Universities that seeks to understand the uptake and bio-localization of...

In a previous article regarding a study performed with mice, we learned that vitamin D is per se necessary for muscle growth and development. The research showed that vitamin D deficiency brought about as a result of genetic deletion of the vitamin D receptor (VDR) led to significant reductions in muscle mass and strength and significant increases in the expression of myostatin and related catabolic genes. Similar but less pronounced changes were observed in healthy mice fed a vitamin D deficient diet as well, suggesting that it is vitamin D signaling that modulates the responses. Now if I were to ask what the number one way to build muscle is, I bet the response would be a majority “resistance training.” This raises the question: Does vitamin-D intake during resistance training improve the skeletal muscle hypertrophic and strength response? Fortunately, an answer comes from a recent publication by Agergaard et al, who...

The health benefits of dietary EPA and DHA are vast, but not everyone consumes fish and other seafood that contains them. For these individuals, supplementation plays an important role doing exactly what it is supposed to do – supplement a dietary deficit. However, there is still much controversy over the most bioavailable form of EPA and DHA in supplements. This is because EPA and DHA can be packaged in different ways, such as bound to phospholipids (PL), bound to triglycerides (TG), or as ethyl esters (EE). Around 95% of dietary fat and most of the storage fat within the body are TG, with most the rest being PL. However, PLs are the primary component of cell membranes, so it is easy to see why some may argue that this form is superior for EPA and DHA supplementation. In contrast to these naturally occurring forms of delivery, EEs are synthetically created by...

The era of vitamin D as solely a regulator of bone and mineral homeostasis is long-gone. Recent evidence suggests vitamin D to be implicated in numerous chronic diseases and adverse health conditions, including those related to skeletal muscle. In fact, muscle weakness and pain are prominent features of vitamin D deficiency that respond to replacement therapy. It has been shown that vitamin D receptors (VDRs) are present in human skeletal muscle, but the precise mechanisms through which vitamin D exerts its effects in muscle are unclear. It has been previously demonstrated that culturing muscle cells with vitamin D leads to marked cell growth associated with an inhibition of myostatin (the gate-keeper for growth, if you will). More recently, a pilot study in older women with vitamin D deficiency has shown repletion to increase intramuscular VDR expression and muscle fiber size. However, in vivo data concerning the direct effects of the VDR...