What the ....

[porekop]

C9-T11

safflower supplement:

http://www.teamanr.com/C9_T11_Muscle_Maker_s/24.htm

just wondering if this would be serious, wouldn't be everybody muscular by now?

so what's the mafic behind it? anyone ever tried?

[brutus]

I've never heard of it, but it looks like misleading junk. The ad reminds me of the Force Factor ads, and that stuff is about useless.

[Aielyn]

I looked into it as much as I could. It claims to come from research published in "Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise". Now, the journal *does* exist. But there's no article in the journal that refers to the scientific name of the plant, Carthamus tinctorius, or the supposed scientific name of the nutrient, cis-9-trans-11. There is mention of safflower, but so far as I can see, it's referring to safflower oil, which is used at times for things like delivering testosterone - that is, the oil isn't relevant, it's just a stabiliser liquid.

Furthermore, I can find no research by Medstat Research (which is not called "Medstat Research Centre", as teamanr claims) on "Carthamus tinctorius", and the only articles that include mentions of both them and safflower are about using safflower oil.

And then there's the fact that "Cis-9-Trans-11" doesn't make sense as a chemical name. It might work as the first part of a chemical name, but certainly not as the whole name (and no scientist would ever use that part of a chemical name on its own - just as one wouldn't refer to a white sheep as "a white" - it's a description component, not an identity). Indeed, every mention I could find of that phrase in a google scholar search were to cis-9, trans-11 conjugated linoleic acid or cis-9, trans-11 octadecadienoic acid (which, it turns out, are two names for the same thing).

From what I can tell, there's a kernel of truth to the claim - that there's a substance found in safflower that has been found to impact the balance of fat and muscle in certain animals. Beyond this, from what I can see, the rest is full of crap.

And furthermore, the same substance is also found in cattle and other ruminant animals.

Here's a bodybuilding.com link talking about CLA (including the cis-9-trans-11 variant):

http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/mohr55.htm

The mere fact that this teamANR is claiming that it's some special extract of safflower proves that they're at least a crank site. I wouldn't take them seriously.