by Jeff DeMartin CPTII FND

Created on: May 30, 2008

Separating the solid sports/fitness supplements from industry hype.

It seems that every time you open up a publication, be it a health/fitness magazine or your local newspaper, there is a constant bombardment with full page advertisements for the latest "craze" in nutritional supplementation. Although the most promoted products are usually for fat loss, there are also a quite a few impulse ads for everything else under the sun when it comes to fitness. Heavy claims are made as to how these "magical new formulas" will make you stronger than a bulldozer, make your veins explode out of your skin, give you amazing sex drive, etc. etc.. Anymore it seems like every other page is an advertisement(I did a count recently on a popular fitness magazine and out of 320 pages, I counted roughly 170 pages of "fad" ads. That leaves substantively only about 150 out of 320 pages of actual fitness information.).

If these supplements work as well as they are purported to, then why all the fluff and the need to run anywhere from 2 to 6 page advertisements to tout the same products over and over. Well the plain fact of the matter is, many of these companies develop products based around loose scientific studies on a single ingredient or supposed synergistic combination of ingredients and it's possible effects on performance, fat-loss, etc. Although many of these ingredients may show some promise, most of time the supplements are rushed into production well before any solid scientific validation has been attained. More often than not, subsequent research proves that the original claims as to the efficacy of the key ingredients were either overreaching at best, or at worst, outright invalid.

It would take too many pages of information to go into the specifics of "snake oil" products and ingredients, so I am compiling a list of solid, scientifically backed supplements that are not going to be a waste of your precious time or hard earned money.

FAT LOSS

Let's face it. With the advent of the (now illegal) ECA-stack, there was a true scientifically proven effective supplement to compliment your training and nutrition that really worked. I won't go into the details of the stack because it is now against the law to use due to misuse issues causing adverse reactions. When it was pulled from the shelves, supplement companies started putting out anything that they could to try and keep their revenue in balance, claiming that the new products were just as effective for fat loss. They of course were

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