A java jolt may boost, not wreck, your workout

Fitness experts and dietitians have long advised that exercisers drink up before and during physical activity - but avoid caffeine.

Turns out, though, there's no convincing evidence to support this recommendation, says Armstrong, who published an article on the subject in the July issue of Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews, a journal of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM).

Armstrong and his colleagues reviewed more than a dozen studies and concluded that moderate caffeine consumption - up to about 500 milligrams a day - did not adversely impact exercise. A typical 8-ounce cup of coffee contains 150 milligrams of caffeine while a 12-ounce regular soda has 30 to 50 milligrams.

While caffeine is a mild diuretic - meaning it briefly increases urine production - moderate amounts are not enough to interfere with a workout, Armstrong says. "It doesn't mean that one is dehydrated," he explains. "Dehydration is about the balance of fluid intake and fluid loss."

Little is known about the exercise impact of consuming more than 500 milligrams of caffeine.

The new study is the latest good news about caffeine and exercise. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that a combo of the two helped fight skin cancer in mice.

Fatigue fighter?Previous studies also suggest that a java jolt may even boost performance during activities lasting longer than 30 minutes by enabling exercisers to work out longer. In fact, caffeine was once outlawed at the Olympics because of its performance-enhancing effects.

It's not exactly clear why caffeine helps, but Armstrong and others believe the same mental pick-me-up that helps you get your day started or make it through a boring afternoon at work also may help exercisers fight fatigue and thus go longer. Another theory is that caffeine helps the body turn fat into fuel for longer workouts.

Tara Gidus, a sports dietitian in Orlando, Fla., agrees that caffeine doesn't live up to its reputation as a workout wrecker, at least when it's consumed in moderation.

And she notes that exercisers tend to build up a tolerance to caffeine's effects. "An athlete who is used to consuming caffeine regularly may not experience the same diuretic effect as an athlete who doesn't consume caffeine often," she says.

Larry Kenney, a professor of physiology at Penn State University in University Park and a spokesperson for the ACSM, emphasizes that all exercisers - caffeine addicts or not - need to make sure they stay properly hydrated by replacing lost fluids, especially when it's sizzling outside. How much to drink varies from one person to another.

"Athletes should customize their fluid intake based on their individual sweating rate," Kenney says.

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To find out how much you need to drink, weigh yourself before and after exercise a few times, Kenney advises. This will tell you how much water you're losing so you can determine how much fluid you need to compensate for the loss.

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Sport Fit’s Four Maryland Total Fitness Clubs Top 16,000 Members

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Sport Fit’s Four Maryland Total Fitness Clubs Top 16,000 Members

There are only four Sport Fit Clubs in suburban Maryland yet, according to Club Industry's Fitness Magazine, Sport Fit ranks 73rd of over 29,000 fitness and health clubs in the country.

Bowie, MD () Sport Fit Bowie is the largest of the 4 clubs that include Sport Fit Laurel, Sport Fit Laurel Swim and Sport Fit Severna Park. Each club is distinctly different, however, the club’s formula for success is reflected in the astounding growth of these comprehensive health and fitness clubs. Even though the clubs are located in transient communities, the club’s retention rate is aligned with industry standards and their sales rates exceed expectations every year. In addition to the membership growth, the facility and program offerings have grown as well.

Sport Fit is always adding new classes and equipment to meet demand.

Sport Fit Bowie is the largest of the four and has over 4,000 sq. ft. of cardio equipment, 2,000 sq. ft. of circuit equipment and 7,000 sq. ft. of free weight equipment, 9 tennis courts, 3 racquetball courts, 3 swimming pools and a basketball court, cycle room, and aerobics room.

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Uh-Oh

Researchers have finally found evidence for what good Catholic boys have known all along - erotic images make you go blind. The effect is temporary and lasts just a moment, but the research has added to road-safety campaigners' calls to ban sexy billboard-advertising near busy roads, in the hope of preventing accidents.

The new study by US psychologists found that people shown erotic or gory images frequently fail to process images they see immediately afterwards. And the researchers say some personality types appear to be affected more than others by the phenomenon, known as "emotion-induced blindness".

David Zald, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Marvin Chun and colleagues from Yale University in Connecticut, showed hundreds of images to volunteers and asked them to pick a specific image from the rapid sequence. Most of the images were landscape or architectural scenes, but the psychologists included a few emotionally charged images, portraying violent or sexually provocative scenes.

The closer these emotionally charged images occurred prior to the target image, the more frequently people failed to spot the target image, the researchers found.

"We observed that people failed to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after neutral images," Zald says.

Primitive brain

"We think there is essentially a bottleneck for information processing and if a certain type of stimulus captures attention, it can jam up the bottleneck so subsequent information can't get through," Zald explains. "It appears to happen involuntarily. The stimulus captures attention and once allocated to that particular stimulus, no other stimuli can get through" for several tenths of a second.

He believes that a primitive part of the brain, known as the amygdala, may play a part. That region is involved in evaluating sensory input according to its emotional relevance and has an autonomic role, influencing heart rate and sweating.

"It is possible that emotionally-charged stimuli produce preferential rapid routing of the impulse that bypasses the slower cortical route via the amygdala," Zald told New Scientist. "Patients with amygdala lesions pick out the target image without reacting to violent images, although they show normal blindness reactions when sexual images are introduced, which suggests another mechanism may also be involved."

Harm avoiders

The researchers think emotion-induced blindness could lead to drivers simply not seeing another car or pedestrian if they have just witnessed an emotionally charged scene, such as an accident or sexually explicit billboard.

The effect could exacerbate the more obvious problem of drivers simply being distracted by large, arresting images. "It's the responsibility of drivers to ensure that when they are behind the wheel they keep their eyes on the job in hand," says a spokeswoman from Brake, a UK road safety organisation.

And some people are more vulnerable than others. The study assessed participants using a personality questionnaire, rating them according to their level of "harm avoidance". Those scoring highly were more fearful, careful and cautious; those scoring low were more carefree and more comfortable in difficult or dangerous situations.

The researchers found that those with low harm avoidance scores were better able to stay focused on a target image than those with high harm avoidance scores.

"People who are more harm avoidant may not be detecting negative stimuli more than other people, but they have a greater difficulty suppressing that information," Zald suggests.

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Decoding Food Labels

Look at the ingredients on the back of your ice cream. What do you expect to see? Milk, sugar, perhaps vanilla? What you might find, though, is glycerol monostearate, an emulsifier that can help to keep the milk fat in suspension and limits the growth of ice crystals on the ice cream.

Labels can be deceiving and many times we don't even know what we are eating! The ingredients with the strange names usually fall under certain categories and serve certain functions in our food. For instance:

Acidity regulators: These are used to adjust the acidity or basicity of foods and include buffers, acids, alkalis and neutralizing agents.

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Anti-caking agents: These make the product more free-flowing.

Emulsifiers: These are very common and allow for easier mixing of oils and water. One example of a food emulsifier is egg yolk.

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Flavor enhancers: These help bring out the natural flavor in the food. The most known is the controversial monosodium glutamate (MSG) sodium salt of the amino acid glutamic acid and a form of glutamate.

Modified starch: A type of thickening agent.

Stabilizers: These are added to food to help stop them from separating.

Sweeteners: Natural and non-sugar sweeteners. "There are many, many ways to say 'sugar,' and consumers are not often aware that a product contains a lot of sugar, because it doesn't say sugar," says nutritionist Susan Burke.

"All nutritive sweeteners have a similar amount of calories, ranging from 16 calories per teaspoon for white sugar (sucrose) to 20 calories for honey. Read the label; you'll be surprised to see all the sugars in a box of breakfast cereal. They all have similar nutrition. Even if you think it's healthier, it's still just sugar as far as your body is concerned. If you eat too much, it's stored as fat."

These sugars often appear on food ingredient lists: glucose, fructose, lactose, maltose, sucrose (white sugar), corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup, brown sugar, honey, malt syrup, fruit-juice concentrate and cane sugar.

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