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Advice to anyone who wants to use ribose...

As a dietary supplement, ribose is marketed to athletes involved in sports requiring repeated bouts of high-intensity activity, such as weight lifting, sprinting, or soccer.

According to Bioenergy, Inc., a company that sells, and also owns several patents on, ribose, "whether you're just feeling sluggish and rundown, or suffer from poor cardiovascular health, or you're a high performance athlete looking for that extra edge, BIOENERGY Ribose is truly The Absolute Energy Source".

Ribose

Ribose is used to generate ATP (short for adenosine triphosphate). In theory, supplementing your diet with additional ribose should increase the rate at which ATP is generated, leading to an improvement in exercise performance and faster muscle growth.

Before you read on, it's important to understand a little more about what ATP is, and the role it plays in exercise performance. Just like every country has its own currency, your body has its own "energy currency" — known as adenosine triphosphate, or ATP for short. ATP is constantly being broken down and "recreated". In the process, it provides energy for every move you make and every chemical reaction that occurs in your body.

The adenine portion of adenine triphosphate consists of one molecule of adenine and the five-carbon sugar, ribose. The triphosphate portion of ATP consists of three phosphate molecules.

Energy is released when one of those phosphates is broken off from ATP. The compound then becomes adenosine diphosphate (ADP), which consists of adenosine and two phosphate molecules. ADP becomes adenosine monophosphate (AMP) when another phosphate molecule is broken off.

ATP

The ratio between ATP, ADP and AMP is critical in regulating the energy content of a cell. However, during high-intensity exercise, the cell is unable to "recreate" ATP fast enough. Under these conditions, the concentrations of ADP and AMP rise, leading to a reduction in the "energy charge" of the cell.

If ATP use continues to exceed the rate at which it can be generated, nucleotides are lost from the cell in an attempt to restore the ratio between ATP, ADP and AMP.

Replacing these lost adenine nucleotides can take several days, reducing the rate at which muscle fibers are repaired. Supplemental ribose can increase the speed at which these nucleotides are replaced, both at rest and during exercise [9]. As such, there has been a great deal of interest in the potential of ribose supplements to boost muscular performance in sports...

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