H.E.A.T. Blog

Just because it says "sugar-free" on the package doesn't mean it really is. Here's an interesting snippet from the NYT blog that explains how artificial sweetners are often paired with things called sugar alcohols, which provide fewer calories than regular sugar and are found in tons of everything from sugarless cookies to gum.  

While it might not matter much for most people, this can make things tricky for those of us who are trying to manage our blood sugar. You can identify sugar alcohols in food by looking for ingredients that end in "-ol," like sorbitol, maltitol and xylitol. {Read the rest}

And we're back! Apologies for the temporary hiatus, folks. Just in case you missed this one, here's a great NYT story about how there are turning out to be more differences between the way men and women respond to exercise science than researchers originally thought.

New studies are finding that women react differently to protein during recovery; they pack fewer carbohydrates into their muscles for fuel; and they sustain less muscle damage during hard intervals than their male counterparts. It's not completely clear what this means yet -- we still need more research that includes females. (Exercise studies have typically used only male "guinea pigs" and just assumed the same results applied to estrogen-enhanced athletes.) But the hope is that these findings (and the ones to follow) will eventually help us train better for our body types and improve our understanding of why we perform the way we do.

{Read the rest}