Author Archives: Colby Vorland

Weekend Update

Here are some neat things I came across this week: A bunch of free papers on food policy and obesity: Selected Papers : Journal of Public Health Policy Acetylation regulates DNA maintenance: Scientists Find a Key to Maintaining Our DNA - News Room - University of Rochester Medical Center Vitamin A activates the nuclear receptor TL4 (another study with intermittent fasting and TL4 below) & thus regulates gene expression Vitamin A plays key role in the human body, study suggests Not Read more [...]

Weekend Update

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A little late this time, but here are some links I found interesting this past week: Peter at Obesity Panacea discusses another study correlating exercise to leukocyte telomere length (LTL) >> Physical activity protects our body from cognitive stress | Obesity Panacea I have noticed similar studies of recent showing LTL length is related to such things as obesity, endurance running, and omega-3 intake. Nature News describes cool new research suggesting an involvement of gut microbes Read more [...]

Gene-environment interaction database related to nutritional phenotypes

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Larry Parnell (Twitter, Blog), Yu-Chi Lee, Chao-Qiang Lai, & Jose Ordovas (Twitter) took what must have been an enormous amount of time and put together a database of gene-environment interactions related to lipids, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. I had no idea this many had been studied so far! Their open access paper is available here. The data is taken from 154 published papers & 1 unpublished observation from studies using at least 20 adult subjects, and they found 554 GxE Read more [...]

Weekend Update

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Thanks to Travis Saunders' reminder of how Weekend Roundups benefit both readers and bloggers, I am starting it back up here. So here are some fascinating research papers, blog posts, and articles that I came across this past week. Please feel free to add your links in the comments! Adipocyte turnover found to be 1-5% per day, much greater than previous estimations, preadipocytes even higher, reaffirming the potential for intervention in adipose turnover for obesity treatment. Rapid Cellular Read more [...]

Athletes: obey your thirst

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Tim Noakes has a nice review paper in the Annals of Nutrition & Metabolism on hydration for athletes: Is Drinking to Thirst Optimum? It is open access at least for now. In short, Noakes makes a convincing case that drinking to 'stay ahead of thirst' during exercise is unnecessary and simply drinking according to thirst is best for several reasons. It has a great history on how it came to be that before 1965, it was commonly accepted that athletes should not consume liquids during competition Read more [...]

Podcast

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Last fall I was invited to do a podcast from Travis Saunders and (now Dr.) Peter Janiszewski who blog at Obesity Panacea. We touched briefly on clinical assessment capacities (stemming from more complex research assessments), and corporate food sponsorships. We also talked about social media but Travis edited out those parts which may end up in a different podcast. Being the first time I have done something like this, I was pretty nervous and had some troubles stumbling through my thoughts, Read more [...]

“Antioxidants” in chocolate (and fruit): don’t buy the hype

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Last week, just in time for Valentine's day (clever science marketing or lucky peer review speed?), Hershey announced that cocoa is a "super fruit" with a paper in the Chemistry Central Journal (open access). Here is a random sampling of just a few of many media takes on the press release: From WebMD (and a great review of this by HealthNewsReview.org) Researchers found the antioxidant activity of dark chocolate and cocoa powder was equivalent to or higher than that found in some other so-called Read more [...]

Mitochondrial membrane alpha-tocopherol/homologues: super scavengers or peroxidase inhibitors?

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I love research that alters established dogma with new technology (hence Nutritional Blogma), so I felt compelled to highlight this one. Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) are structurally important in cell and some organelle membranes. For simplicity's sake, we are often shown a representation like this: Each of the heads with 2 tails represents a phospholipid, which is composed of the polar NH3 group, a phosophate group, glycerol, and 2 fatty acid tails. In this representation, one of the Read more [...]

Epidemiological evidence that UV exposure & vitamin D independently may reduce multiple sclerosis risk

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Last year, I wrote about a mouse study that suggested UVB exposure suppressed a model of multiple sclerosis (MS) independent of vitamin D production. So I was excited to see media reports this week covering another study, this one epidemiological in nature, that supports this hypothesis. The study by Lucas and colleagues analyzed data from The Ausimmune Study, of 282 patients who have had a first diagnosis of CNS demyelination (FCD) and of these, 216 had a first demyelinating event (FDE) (note Read more [...]

Quercetin paradox in a complex antioxidant network

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This is sort of a random post, but I remember coming across this paper from 2007 awhile back titled "The quercetin paradox" that shows how quercetin protects against some oxidative damage in a lung cell line but the oxidation product reacts with glutathione (GSH), lowering its concentration, which leads to an increase in LDH leakage and cytosolic free calcium (an apparent indication of cytotoxicity). So it was a neat example of a redirection of oxidative stress onto another antioxidant in the complex Read more [...]