Early indications show that nutritional supplements may lessen muscle atrophy brought on by space travel, prolonged bed confinement or immobility. To study space travel’s effect on muscles, Dr. Robert Wolfe of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston enlisted healthy subjects to stay in bed 28 days during a National Space Biomedical Research Institute study.

“One cause of muscle atrophy in space is lack of muscular activity. That’s why bed rest is a good model because it minimizes activity, and like astronauts, you lose muscle mass primarily in the legs,” said co-investigator Dr. Arny Ferrando, a professor of surgery at UTMB and Shriners Hospital for Children in Galveston. “When muscles are inactive, as they are in space, they don’t make new proteins. If muscle breakdown rates are the same, that means you lose muscle.”

Researchers are attempting to increase protein synthesis rates with supplements of amino acids, which are the raw materials of protein. Participants received the supplements three times a day, and researchers compared the protein synthesis/breakdown rates and muscle mass before and after the bed-rest study. This data was compared to results from a control group that received a placebo drink instead of the supplements.

“Early results suggest that the amino acid supplement is able to maintain synthesis rates and body mass,” Ferrando said.

During the study, subjects must remain in bed and can get up only briefly to use a bedside commode. They eat and bathe from their beds, and daily activities encompass watching television, reading books and using a bedside computer.

Midway through the study, researchers determine muscle mass and function by testing the subjects’ strength and body composition.

They gather the most vital data, the protein synthesis and breakdown rates, by using stable isotope analysis. With the stable isotope technique, researchers attach a harmless tracer to specific amino acids that travel through the bloodstream. Then, they take blood samples to determine the amount of amino acids that enter and exit the leg.

“If 80 amino acids are coming into the artery and 60 are going out of the vein, we know that 20 were probably made into proteins in the muscle,” said Dr. Douglas Paddon-Jones, also of UTMB and a co-investigator performing these studies. “We complete the muscle analysis by removing a small piece of muscle and determining how many amino acids have been incorporated into proteins. Over time, we can calculate the rate at which the synthesis and breakdown occurs.”

Space conditions also elevate the body’s level of the stress hormone cortisol, which increases the breakdown rate of proteins. “Under stress, the body breaks down proteins to make energy for survival,” said Ferrando, a member of NSBRI’s nutrition and fitness research team. “However, this process also causes muscle atrophy.”

To study the supplement’s effects on muscle loss due to elevated levels of cortisol, researchers infused the stress hormone into the participants’ blood during the stable isotope tests. The researchers mimic the cortisol concentrations found during space flight, then determine protein synthesis and breakdown rates of the subjects taking the supplement and compare this to the rates of the control group.

Ferrando and Wolfe are also collaborating with other NSBRI researchers who use the subjects’ body fluids to study changes in bone, immune function and cell damage induced by bed rest.

Findings from this research on nutritional supplements could benefit patients on Earth.

“Muscle atrophy is common in many populations: the elderly, kids with burns, patients in intensive care or people who have had major operations. We’re looking at this phenomenon in terms of space flight, but the study has many other implications,” Ferrando said.

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Article adapted by MD Sports from original press release.
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Contact: Kathy Major
National Space Biomedical Research Institute 

The NSBRI’s consortium members include Baylor College of Medicine, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Harvard Medical School, The Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Morehouse School of Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Rice University, Texas A&M University, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, University of Pennsylvania Health System and University of Washington.

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Research

It’s fewer calories not Carbs or fluid loss responsible for weight loss.

PHILADELPHIA —  A new three-week in-hospital study of 10 volunteers found that during the two-week period on a strictly controlled very-low carbohydrate diet, participants lost an average of 3.6 pounds, voluntarily reduced their calorie intake from 3,111 calories per day to 2,164 calories per day, and did not eat more of the readily available fat and protein to make up for the lost carbohydrate calories.The study, “Effect of a Low-Carbohydrate Diet on Appetite, Blood Glucose Levels, and Insulin Resistance in Obese Patients with Type 2 Diabetes,” compared a very low-carbohydrate diet with a regular diet. It is published in the March 15, 2005, issue of Annals of Internal Medicine and is the subject of a video news release.

During the first study week, participants, who were obese and had mild type 2 diabetes mellitus, ate a regular diet in which they could eat anything and as much as they wanted. They ate about 3,000 calories and 300 grams of carbohydrates per day and remained at entry weight.

In the following two weeks, when restricted to 20 grams of carbohydrates per day, as specified in the Atkins induction diet, and despite readily available protein and fat foods, the participants voluntarily ate about 1,000 fewer calories per day, a calorie intake considered appropriate to their height.

Participants’ blood sugar improved on the low-carb diet, with better insulin sensitivity and lower blood triglycerides and cholesterol levels.

“We proved that people lose weight on the Atkins diet because they eat less (consume fewer calories), not because they get bored with the diet or lose body water or because the carbohydrate calories are treated differently by the body than fat or protein calories,” said Guenther Boden, MD, a Laura H. Carnell Professor of Medicine and chief of the division of endocrinology/diabetes/metabolism at Temple University School of Medicine.

“All the weight loss was in fat,” said Boden, the lead study author. “We weighed and measured every calorie that participants ate and every calorie they spent. We knew what went in and what went out.”

“On the very low-fat diet, participants spontaneously reduced their calories by about 1,000 per day. One gram of fat equals 9 calories, so, doing the math, you can determine how much fat will be lost by cutting 1,000 calories.”

Boden also believes that the carbohydrates actually stimulated the patients’ big appetites during the regular-diet week.

“Participants went from an excessive caloric intake to a normal caloric intake for their height and weight when we reduced their carbohydrates. This indicates to me that it was the carbohydrates that stimulated the excessive appetite,” Boden said.

Throughout the three-week study, researchers weighed all food, monitored exercise, measured participants’ calorie energy intake, expenditure and body water composition, and tested blood sugar, cholesterol, and several hormone levels believed to be involved in appetite regulation.

“You don’t have to cut carbs as drastically as participants did,” said Boden. “If you cut carbs modestly, you cut calories, and you’ll lose weight.”

“The message is: Calories count,” Boden said. “If you want to lose weight, you have to decrease your food intake or increase your physical activity. It helps to know that carbohydrates make it more difficult to reduce food intake. So cutting the carbohydrates, at least to some extent, will help keep down the caloric intake. With fewer carbohydrates, you’re going to eat fewer total calories a day.”

George A. Bray, MD, Chief, Division of Clinical Obesity and Metabolism at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., and a well-known researcher in obesity and diabetes, wrote an accompanying editorial, “Is There Something Special about Low-Carbohydrate Diets?”

Bray notes that the study is small but calls it “a nicely done, short-term metabolic ward study.” He says that using “many different diets with different approaches to food restriction for individual patients at different times in their efforts to lose weight may be the most effective way a clinician can use the available diets. … (I) am not yet convinced that one diet has any more value than another — they all have value.”

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Article adapted by MD Sports from original press release.
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Contact: Susan Anderson
American College of Physicians

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Research News
How to Build Muscle and Increase Strenght With FHL1 Amino Acids that Tell Muscle Cells to Build Protien Decrease Fat and Over Muscle with Growth Factor

 In many HIV-infected individuals with prior weight loss, the failure to regain weight and lean tissue is at least in part the consequence of inadequate protein intake or ingestion of a poor-quality protein rather than total caloric intake. Dietary sources of protein are presumably inadequate to meet the high metabolic needs caused by HIV infection. To achieve a target protein intake in the range (1.5 to 2.0 g/kg/day) demonstrated in other catabolic diseases necessary to achieve positive nitrogen balance and to generate substantial anabolic effects.

A high-quality protein food supplement may help HIV-positive patients maintain, and possibly gain, muscle mass. Many HIV-positive patients lose weight that they are then unable to regain. This may be because patients are not eating enough protein or are not eating the right kinds of protein. The protein eaten in foods (such as meat, eggs, or beans) may not be able to make up for the amount of protein lost due to HIV infection.

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How to Build Muscle and Increase Strenght With FHL1 Amino Acids that Tell Muscle Cells to Build Protien Decrease Fat and Over Muscle with Growth Factor

Negative Energy Balance

By Sandco Staff

University Park, Pa. - Female athletes often lose their menstrual cycle when training strenuously, but researchers have long speculated on whether this infertility was due to low body fat, low weight or exercise itself. Now, researchers have shown that the cause of athletic amenorrhea is more likely a negative energy balance caused by increasing exercise without increasing food intake.

“A growing proportion of women are susceptible to losing their menstrual cycle when exercising strenuously,” says Dr. Nancy I. Williams, assistant professor of kineseology and physiology at Penn State. “If women go six to 12 months without having a menstrual cycle, they could show bone loss. Bone densities in some long distance runners who have gone for a prolonged time period without having normal menstrual cycles can be very low.”

In studies done with monkeys, which show menstrual cyclicity much like women, researchers showed that low energy availability associated with strenuous exercise training plays an important role in causing exercise-induced amenorrhea. These researchers, working at the University of Pittsburgh, published findings in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism showing that exercise-induced amenorrhea was reversible in the monkeys by increasing food intake while the monkeys still exercised.

Williams worked with Judy L. Cameron, associate professor of psychiatry and cell biology and physiology at the University of Pittsburgh. Dana L. Helmreich and David B. Parfitt, then graduate students, and Anne Caston-Balderrama, at that time a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, were also part of the research team. The researchers decided to look at an animal model to understand the causes of exercise-induced amenorrhea because it is difficult to closely control factors, such as eating habits and exercise, when studying humans. They chose cynomolgus monkeys because, like humans, they have a menstrual cycle of 28 days, ovulate in mid-cycle and show monthly periods of menses.

“It is difficult to obtain rigorous control in human studies, short of locking people up,” says Williams.

Previous cross-sectional studies and short-term studies in humans had shown a correlation between changes in energy availability and changes in the menstrual cycle, but those studies were not definitive.

There was also some indication that metabolic states experienced by strenuously exercising women were similar to those in chronically calorie restricted people. However, whether the increased energy utilization which occurs with exercise or some other effect of exercise caused exercise-induced reproductive dysfunction was unknown.

“The idea that exercise or something about exercise is harmful to females was not definitively ruled out,” says Williams. “That exercise itself is harmful would be a dangerous message to put out there. We needed to look at what it was about exercise that caused amenorrhea, what it was that suppresses ovulation. To do that, we needed a carefully controlled study.”

After the researchers monitored normal menstrual cycles in eight monkeys for a few months, they trained the monkeys to run on treadmills, slowly increasing their daily training schedule to about six miles per day. Throughout the training period the amount of food provided remained the standard amount for a normal 4.5 to 7.5 pound monkey, although the researchers note that some monkeys did not finish all of their food all of the time.

The researchers found that during the study “there were no significant changes in body weight or caloric intake over the course of training and the development of amenorrhea.” While body weight did not change, there were indications of an adaptation in energy expenditure. That is, the monkeys’ metabolic hormones also changed, with a 20 percent drop in circulating thyroid hormone, suggesting that the suppression of ovulation is more closely related to negative energy balance than to a decrease in body weight.

To seal the conclusion that a negative energy balance was the key to exercise-induced amenorrhea, the researchers took four of the previous eight monkeys and, while keeping them on the same exercise program, provided them with more food than they were used to. All the monkeys eventually resumed normal menstrual cycles. However, those monkeys who increased their food consumption most rapidly and consumed the most additional food, resumed ovulation within as little as 12 to 16 days while those who increased their caloric intake more slowly, took almost two months to resume ovulation.

Williams is now conducting studies on women who agree to exercise and eat according to a prescribed regimen for four to six months. She is concerned because recreational exercisers have the first signs of ovulatory suppression and may easily be thrust into amenorrhea if energy availability declines. Many women that exercise also restrict their calories, consciously or unconsciously.

“Our goal is to test whether practical guidelines can be developed regarding the optimal balance between calories of food taken in and calories expended through exercise in order to maintain ovulation and regular menstrual cycles,” says Williams. “This would then ensure that estrogen levels were also maintained at healthy levels. This is important because estrogen is a key hormone in the body for many physiological systems, influencing bone strength and cardiovascular health, not just reproduction.”

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Article adapted by MD Sports from original press release.
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Contact: A’ndrea Elyse Messer
Penn State