A recent CW survey revealed a stark divide in opinion on sports supplements. But who wins this debate, asks Chris Marshall-Bell, the purists or the pill-poppers?
How long would it take you to eat half a cow? No, we don’t know either. But if you wanted to get a 20g dose of creatine from a natural food source, that’s what you would need to do.
“We ordinarily get 2g of creatine a day,”explains Luc Van Loon, a professor of physiology and nutrition at Maastricht University in the Netherlands,“a gram through a normal diet and a gram that we produce naturally, But with creatine supplements, you’re loading 20g a day. To get that in a normal diet, you’d have to eat half a cow. We can’t sustain that in a normal, nutritious diet.”
Creatine is one of the most popular sports supplements worldwide - a market worth more than £40bn and which continues to grow. Supplements crop up all the time when chatting to cyclists.It’s quite hard to define exactly what a sports supplement is, but the vast majority of them – whether in bar, drink, tablet or powder form –claim to benefit an athlete’s performance in a ‘natural’, legal manner.
But eating half a cow’s worth of creatine in a single dose – for example – doesn’t strike me as very natural. Are supplements really in keeping with the spirit of the World Anti-Doping Code or the unwritten sporting code between competitors? Besides, do supplements really make a difference anyway?
We decided to investigate further by conducting an online poll of Cycling Weekly readers, asking about their use of supplements. The results revealed a split, broadly speaking, between two contrasting camps – those who take lots of supplements and those take none at all. It appears to be something of a ‘Marmite’ debate.
Eighty-two percent of the 220 people surveyed take at least one supplement each week – predominantly protein/energy products and vitamins. Of those who took none, most believed that supplements didn’t work or that a normal diet was sufficient and covered all their nutritional needs.
