Sports Supplements Are A Waste Of Time
A new study shows just how worthless many sports supplements are
Sports supplements occupy a weird space in the world. It’s almost impossible to go to a gym regularly and not have some sort of supplement shoved in your face with the advice that it will massively improve your fitness journey. The fitness space is absolutely filled with impossible-sounding claims that some powder or pill is going to drastically improve your health overnight.
There are several issues with this, but one of the biggest ones is that sports supplements - and supplements in general - are very poorly regulated. As a consumer, you basically just have to trust the manufacturer that the product contains what it says it does and that it has the effects that it should.
Which is a problem. As a new study has shown, many of these supplements don’t contain the listed amounts of the substances they say they do. Many supplements have no active ingredients at all. Some even contain illegal additives.
The Science
The new study that’s just been published as a letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open was a very short and simple review of supplements. The authors purchased 63 sports supplements that listed 5 different ingredients online:
- Rauwolfia Vomitaria, which is purported to improve performance
- methylliberine, which people believe makes them more alert
- turkesterone, sold primarily as a weight management aid
- halostachine, which people say have almost every positive impact on your health imaginable
- octopamine, a mild stimulant
Now, I’m not going to get into the details of whether these supplements work. The evidence for supplements in general is pretty bad, but it takes a long time to go over the details for even one of these things, never mind five.
But the authors here weren’t looking at whether these chemicals worked - they were looking at something much simpler. Of the 63 original pills and powders, they excluded six and were left with 57 to test. And what they found was genuinely disastrous for the supplement industry.
23 of these supplements - a full 40% of the total - did not contain any of the ingredients listed on the label. 28 (49%) of the products had the wrong amount, containing anywhere between 0.02%-334% of the stated quantity. Only six (11%) had the ingredient that they said they did in the amount that they reported on the label. So about 90% of people buying these sports supplements were being misled about what they were being sold.
Even worse, seven of the supplements contained illegal ingredients, including four different stimulants that are banned in competitions. So not only do these products not contain the listed ingredients, but there’s a decent chance that if you take them you could be unknowingly violating competition rules and be banned from sporting events.
There is some nuance here. Most of the methylliberine supplements did actually contain methylliberine in doses reasonably close to the stated numbers, and none of them were contaminated with illegal stimulants. Not one of the R Vomitoria supplements had any R Vomitoria in them, and at least one had dangerously high doses of the banned stimulant octodrine. There are clearly some supplements that are at least a bit safer than the rest, even if the overall picture is very depressing.
Of course, this study had limitations. It’s pretty small, there was no random selection, and we don’t know exactly which supplements were tested. It’s not a representative sample, so you can’t necessarily say that these results are going to be the same for any sports supplement on the shelf.
But given the lack of regulation, it’s also not unlikely that this issue is more widespread. At the very least, consumers buying these supplements have no way of knowing whether they’re getting a totally inert powder, a massive overdose, or an illegal stimulant in their pre-workout shake. It’s impossible for anyone buying these very expensive exercise add-ons to know if they are safe and reliable, because there are no independent bodies running checks.
Bottom Line
As a general rule, I’m skeptical of supplements. For your average human being, there are few reasons to take additional supplemental things, unless you have a great deal of difficulty getting enough micronutrients in your diet. This is especially true for sports supplements - the only people who really need to supplement their intake of stuff like protein are elite athletes who exercise 4+ hours a day.
But if you are going to take a supplement, the basic idea is that it should contain what it says on the label and not poison you. And the evidence shows that’s just not something you can guarantee. This is not even a new problem - we’ve got well over a decade of evidence now that many sports supplements are contaminated. There’s a story almost every year about a new study showing that these supplements can be dangerous. It’s hard to understand why there’s still so little regulation of an industry that’s obviously fraught with bad actors.
I’m not going to make some blanket statement about whether you should or shouldn’t grab a powder from the local supplement shop, but if you are going to buy something my advice is to go with a recognized brand that tests its products regularly and reports on exactly what their tests have shown. While the supplement may still be a waste of time - many of them are - at least you’ll be getting what you pay for.