VANADYL
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Some say it's the answer to the carbo-loading-lover's dream. Critics contend it hasn't helped a single endurance athlete run faster. 'Cutting-edge' body builders have been using the stuff for the past two years to 'pump themselves up'. Scientists researching the substance say its main application is for Type-II diabetics. Supporters say it makes an extremely important hormone - insulin - function more efficiently, but carpers claim that it may actually be toxic. The cause of all this controversy? It's vanadyl sulfate (VS), an unusual compound derived from the trace mineral vanadium. Along with creatine, vanadyl sulfate is one of the very 'hottest' sports-nutritional supplements around at the moment. Why such a fuss about VS? A clutch of bodybuilders are reporting that vanadyl sulfate has made their muscles bigger, harder, and more dense, and endurance athletes are regaling their friends with stories about how VS has helped them run longer and faster. The muscle-and-fitness mags are so full of ads and testimonials for the supplement that many athletes are convinced that it must really work. In support, the scientific community has chimed in with reports of better glycogen storage in muscle tissues after VS supplementation. Does VS really work? Well, the precise metabolic action of vanadyl sulfate is not actually known, but scientists have recognised for years that the trace mineral vanadium has some insulin-like effects. You'll recall from school biology that insulin is the body's most important anabolic (ie, tissue-building) hormone, packing energy into muscle cells, the liver, and other key organs and stimulating the synthesis of new tissues. Most relevant to endurance athletes is the fact that insulin promotes the passage of carbohydrate into muscle cells, leading to greater glycogen storage. The more glycogen you can stockpile in your muscles, the longer you can run, cycle, or swim at a decent intensity. The popular press - and of course the manufacturers of VS supplements - contend that VS intensifies the activity of insulin, thereby cramming more glycogen into your muscles. For example, a recent ad stated, 'Vanadyl sulfate is the real deal because it dramatically increases glucose uptake by the muscle cells'. What scientists say Scientists have been reluctant to scoff at these claims, because they reckon that insulin works by attaching to 'receptors' on muscle- cell membranes. This insulin-receptor attachment is what actually promotes the passage of glucose into muscle cells, thereby leading to glycogen synthesis. However, a key point to remember is that muscle cells' receptors may be turned 'off' or 'on'. When they are off, glucose has to linger in the blood, because insulin can't find a nesting spot on the muscle's exterior. When they are on, glucose can cascade inward. In theory at least, vanadyl sulfate helps keep the receptors in the 'on' position. If VS really works this way, it might hustle super-normal amounts of sugar into muscle cells and thus produce 'super- glycogen-storage' in your muscles. That would mean that your endurance performances in events lasting longer than an hour would be very likely to improve (workouts or competitions lasting more than 60 minutes can whittle away enough glycogen to slow you down considerably - unless your glycogen stores happen to be super- abundant). If you were a bodybuilder, VS could also be good for you, because super-passage of carbohydrate (and therefore water, which is stored with glycogen) into your muscles might really pump you up. Sounds great, but does it really work that way? Well, the truth is that there aren't that many scientific studies concerning VS and glycogen storage, and there are no studies carried out with real athletes: Most of the work has been done with diabetics, mice, or rats. However, what has been done is quite interesting. Just the facts In studies carried out with diabetic mice (yes, the little fellows get diabetes, too), vanadium helps glucose gush into muscle, liver, and adipose cells. And research also suggests that vanadium compounds like vanadyl sulfate can help diabetic rats 'pump up' - store more glycogen and build better muscle tissue. At the human end of things, researchers at The Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York recently gave 100 mg of VS daily (two 50-mg doses) to six individuals with non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (Type-II diabetes). Type-II diabetics are ideal subjects for VS research, since they are 'insulin-resistant' and might benefit if VS managed to boost insulin's potency. One hoped-for outcome would be for VS to eliminate the subjects' hyperglycaemia (high blood sugar) by getting insulin to work properly. And in fact, after three weeks of VS supplements, the diabetics in the Einstein study were better off. Before supplementation, the patients had no detectable vanadium at all in their blood, but after taking VS their blood-vanadium levels rocketed. Meanwhile, blood-sugar levels dropped significantly, mainly because VS was helping glucose move out of the blood into various tissues, including the muscles, at up to three times the pre-VS rate. Overall, the rate of glycogen storage swelled by over 50 per cent, the exact effect that endurance athletes would hope for. The Einstein researchers reckoned that with VS insulin was indeed more effective at moving glucose out of the blood. In addition, the vanadium seemed to hang around in the subjects' bodies after they stopped taking it, since insulin was still working more efficiently two weeks after all VS supplementation was stopped. Is it settled then? Can VS really stoke more glycogen into your leg muscles and help you carve big chunks of time from your endurance efforts? Well, before we make that lofty claim we'd better take a closer look at the Einstein study, because there were some potentially bad things that happened, too. First of all, a lot of the subjects had gastrointestinal problems when they took VS. Specifically, five out of the six had nausea, diarrhoea, or abdominal cramps. Three individuals noticed dark discolourations of their stools. Fortunately, most of these problems disappeared after a week or so. Vanadium and iron compete More troubling was the fact that haemoglobin (the key protein which carries oxygen to muscle cells) dropped by about 7 per cent after VS supplementation, and haematocrit (the percentage of blood made up of red cells) went down by around 5 per cent. Those are effects no endurance athlete would be thrilled about. 'We don't know exactly why this occurred,' says Dr. Harry Shamoon, one of the Albert Einstein researchers. 'However, vanadium does compete with iron for entry into red blood cells, so perhaps the vanadium was interfering with the red blood cells' ability to get adequate iron for haemoglobin construction.' That's a competition - and interference - which might lead to slower - not faster - performance times for athletes. More disturbingly, safety concerns about vanadium supplements remain 'unsettled', says Shamoon. 'Vanadium sulfate has been given to rats for up to one year - at relative doses which are far greater than humans would utilise - without any major problems, but the health effects of VS supplements have only been looked at for very short periods of time - just a few weeks or so - in people. There are just no long-term studies demonstrating safety in humans,' notes Shamoon. The Einstein-researcher's key concern is that VS may in effect make insulin too potent. 'Insulin is a growth factor; it can make cells enlarge and divide more actively. The truth is that we don't have any idea how VS might influence the risk of tumour development and growth, and it's also possible that vanadyl sulfate might contribute to atherogenesis (the creation of fatty deposits on the interiors of blood-vessel walls).' Further, we have to point out that there's not a drop of evidence to suggest that VS works in athletes in the same manner in which it operates in diabetics. 'Athletes already have normal insulin action; they don't need the priming effect of vanadyl sulfate to store lots of muscle glycogen,' says Shamoon. In fact, one of Shamoon's studies carried out with 'normal' (non-diabetic) subjects detected no improvement at all in glycogen storage with vanadyl-sulfate supplementation. The bottom line? Vanadyl sulfate is relatively costly, and no well-controlled scientific study has linked the stuff with improved performances in either strength or endurance athletes. Finally, the risks associated with long-term vanadyl-sulfate supplementation are not well known. More information is certain to become available about VS in the next few years, but in the meantime, does it really make sense to become a guinea pig and fool around with the compound?
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