Sigma Nutrition Radio

Links: Click here for episode page Receive our free weekly email about nutrition/health content About This Episode: Avrum Bluming received his MD from the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. He spent four years as a senior investigator for the National Cancer Institute and for two of those years was director of the Lymphoma Treatment Center in Kampala, Uganda. He organized the first study of lumpectomy for the treatment of breast cancer in Southern California in 1978, and for more than two decades he has been studying the benefits and risks of hormone replacement therapy administered to women with a history of breast cancer. Dr. Bluming has served as a clinical professor of medicine at USC and has been an invited speaker at the Royal College of Physicians in London and the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He was elected to mastership in the American College of Physicians, an honor accorded to only five hundred of the over one hundred thousand board-certified internists in this country. Carol Tavris received her PhD in social psychology from the University of Michigan. Her books include Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), with Elliot Aronson; Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, and The Mismeasure of Woman. She has written articles, op-eds, and book reviews on topics in psychological science for a wide array of publications — including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, and the TLS — and a column, “The Gadfly,” for Skeptic magazine. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and has received numerous awards for her efforts to promote gender equality, science, and skepticism.

Links:  Go to episode page Receive Danny's free emails Subscribe to Sigma Nutrition Premium About This Episode: Jackson Peos, PhD was the lead researcher on the ICECAP trial (Intermittent versus Continuous Energy restriction Compared in an Athlete Population), looks at the effect of including a “diet break” week after every 3 weeks of dieting, compared to a continuous hypocaloric diet for the duration of the full dieting period. In This Episode We Discuss: - Theoretical reasons for including diet breaks and refeeds within dieting periods - Distinguishing between intermittent fasting protocols and intermittent moderate energy restriction (MOD-IER) - Lessons learned from the MATADOR trial - What might differ between obese and athletic populations - Design of Jackson’s “ICECAP trial” - Determining the duration, frequency and magnitude of diet breaks, refeeds and energy restriction - Current best practices for implementing these strategies  

Links:  Go to episode page Receive Danny's free emails Subscribe to Sigma Nutrition Premium About This Episode: Eric is currently a Research Fellow at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. His work is focused on training and nutrition interventions that could have implications for bodybuilders, powerlifters and other strength athletes. Eric has many peer reviewed publications and currently has many ongoing research projects and collaborations. In This Episode We Discuss: Ongoing trial looking at effects of differnt sizes of caloric surplus for muscle gain Eric’s unconventional appraoch to his current contest prep Non-quantitative tracking and assessment of progress Applying lessons from bodybuilding to other areas of life

Links:  Go to episode page Receive Danny's free emails Subscribe to Sigma Nutrition Premium About This Episode: Nick Gant is Director of the Exercise Neurometabolism Laboratory at the University of Auckland. His group uses interdisciplinary approaches from the nutritional sciences and neurosciences to investigate the role of nutrition in brain health and performance. Nick is particularly interested in foods and supplements that prevent brain fatigue and improve physical and cognitive function. His research is currently funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand, the Health Research Council of New Zealand, and several industrial partnerships. He partners with clinicians and dieticians within the NZ Centre for Brain Research and provides scientific and educational support for elite athletes, government and military organisations In This Episode We Discuss: Understanding fatigue Hypoxia-induced decrements in cognitive performance Role of caffeine and stimulants in “rescuing” performance in high-fatigue/high-stress states Creatine for cognitive function and brain health Potential for creatine mitigating traumatic brain injury (TBI) Can ketones aid in mitigating traumatic brain injury? Thoughts on cognitive impact of nicotine CHO mouth rinsing: proposed mechanism of action

Links:  Go to episode page Receive Danny's free emails Subscribe to Sigma Nutrition Premium About This Episode: Kate has both undergraduate and graduate degrees in Psychology and spent time as a psychology professor at a college and university level. She currently is a health & nutrition coach, working for Precision Nutrition, where she has coached over 1,000 people. Now she coaches fitness professionals on how to be better coaches. In This Episode We Discuss: --> Using an understanding of human psychology to improve coaching outcomes --> How we go about rationalizing our behaviour. --> How coaches can develop empathy --> Fitting the diet to your lifestyle: how much leeway/flexible does one give? --> The best skills a coach can teach themself --> Resilience --> Proactive and reactive coping strategies

Links:  Go to episode page Receive Danny's free emails Subscribe to Sigma Nutrition Premium About This Episode: James A. Lindsay holds degrees in physics and mathematics, with a doctorate in the latter. His previous books include Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly and Life in Light of Death. He has been in the news for submitting, along with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, a series of hoax papers to peer-review (seven of which were published) in fields that categorise as “grievance studies”.

Links:  Go to episode page Receive Danny's free emails Subscribe to Sigma Nutrition Premium About This Episode: Bryan Chung is a plastic/hand surgeon and PhD research designer. He is a methodologist who improves people’s relationship with science. In This Episode We Discuss: --> Bryan’s advice column for people who have “relationship problems with Science” --> If things merely confirm what you are already doing, why you should filter it out --> How to determine what is practically meaningful from a study --> The importance of establishing what the research question is --> How to deal with the daunting nature of statistics in research --> Why you’re already good enough to start engaging with research

Links:  Go to episode page Receive Danny's free emails Subscribe to Sigma Nutrition Premium About This Episode: Professor Barbora de Courten, MD PhD FRACP MPH is a Professor at Monash University, Australia. She is a National Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellow and a specialist physician with a PhD in epidemiology, extensive training in clinical trials (NIH) and a Master of Public Health (Monash University). She has expertise across the translational research continuum from epidemiology, human mechanistic studies to clinical trials and public health interventions through to practice. She is passionate about research into holistic approaches to prevention and treatment of chronic diseases by promoting health through safe, low-cost and easily scalable interventions with the potential to have an immediate public health impact to prevent and treat chronic diseases. She believes this will impact not only health of individuals but also be beneficial to our society and environment we live in. Her vision is to establish new strategies for prevention and management of chronic diseases, specifically obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Her goal is that her research findings will ultimately translate into treatment guidelines, reduced diabetes and cardiovascular morbidity and mortality and reduced healthcare costs. In This Episode We Discuss: --> Mechanisms by which certain behaviours (inactivity, poor diet, smoking, etc.) increase chronic disease risk: inflammation, oxidative stress and advanced glycation (AGE formation). --> What is carnosine? --> How might carnosine supplementation reduce risk? --> Dosage and timing used in trials to date --> Prof. de Courten’s trial showing improvements in insulin sensitivity and an oral glucose tolerance test --> As beta-alanine works by increasing muscle carnosine concentration, could it be useful for the health?

Links:  Go to episode page Receive Danny's free emails Subscribe to Sigma Nutrition Premium About This Episode: Prof. Hawley is Director of the Mary MacKillop Institute for Health at Australian Catholic Universtiy in Melbourne, Australia. He has published over 220 scientific manuscripts, written over 100 articles for technical journals and has authored numerous book chapters for exercise biochemistry and sports medicine texts. He is an Associate Editor for Diabetologia and currently sits on the Editorial Boards of many international journals. He is a frequently invited speaker at both National and International scientific meetings. John’s primary research focus includes the interaction of exercise and diet on the regulation of fat and carbohydrate metabolism, particularly within skeletal muscle, the molecular basis of exercise training adaptation and the cellular bases underlying exercise-induced improvements in insulin action. In This Episode We Discuss: --> Current work being done by Prof. Hawley’s lab on circadian metabolomics Defining the human metabolome and circadian metabolomics --> Comparative analysis of the circadian metabolome in the serum versus peripheral tissues (i.e., skeletal muscle) --> Impact of high-fat or high-carb diet on the daily variation in metabolites --> How dietary intake is a strong zeitgeber for peripheral clocks --> Tissue-specificity of the human circadian metabolome --> Time-restricted feeding in animal models and in humans

Links:  Go to episode page Receive Danny's free emails Subscribe to Sigma Nutrition Premium About This Episode: Alex is currently completing a PhD at the University of Brighton in the UK, investigating the implications of RNA sequencing in the detection of anabolic steroid use and the harnessing of the molecular mechanisms of “muscle memory”. He is currently conducting research aiming to address a hypothesis that suggests that the myonuclei obtained via strength training and anabolic steroid usage are retained and therefore provide long term advantages to steroid users. In This Episode We Discuss: --> The mechanism of hypertrophy via myonuclei accumulation --> Defining “muscle memory” in relation to myonuclei --> Animal models that show myonuclei don’t dissappear after atrophy --> Anabolic steroids activate the stem cells in muscle (satellite cells) resulting in a donation of their nuclei into muscle fibres --> How drug testing works --> How you prove someone has taken exogenous testosterone via T:E ratios --> The Athlete Biological Passport --> Thoughts on the recent Jon Jones case --> Next generation “omic” technologies such as transcriptomics could enhance the testing protocols