Tag: nutrition

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Follow-up: “supplements” v. “sports supplements”

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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After Friday’s column on probiotics, vitamin D and ZMA, I received a very interesting e-mail from Reinhold Vieth, a University of Toronto professor who is one of the world’s leading experts on vitamin D, and who has also conducted research on probiotics. It’s never good news to get an e-mail from a respected researcher who says that, on the topics on which he is an expert, “I came to verdicts opposite to yours today.” Continue reading “Follow-up: “supplements” v. “sports supplements””

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Supplement redux: caffeine

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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In the Jockology series on supplements, I’ve left out the one substance that is by far the clearest performance enhancer, as well as being the most widely used and most easily available: caffeine. That’s mainly because I covered that territory in a Jockology column all about caffeine back in September. Still, I’d be remiss not to mention it — especially in light of a solid article about caffeine’s ergogenic effects by Gina Kolata in today’s New York Times.

One point worth mentioning: Kolata doesn’t differentiate between pure caffeine and coffee. It’s true that many athletes drink a cup of coffee before every race or competition — but coffee has a long list of active ingredients that make its effects harder to predict, as University of Guelph researcher Terry Graham told me last fall:

Caffeine, however, is not the same thing as coffee. The only rigorous study directly comparing the effects of caffeine (in pill form) and coffee was performed in Dr. Graham’s lab. To their surprise, his team found that only pure caffeine produced a performance boost, even when the level of caffeine in the bloodstream from coffee was identical.

Other studies have found a performance-enhancing effect from coffee, so Dr. Graham is cautious about overstating his results. What is clear is that the effects of coffee, with its complex mix of bioactive ingredients, are far harder to nail down than the unambiguous effects of pure caffeine.

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Bonus supplements: beta-alanine

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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As promised, we’ll look at a few athletic supplements that didn’t fit into the two-part Jockology series, starting with beta-alanine:

The supplement: Beta-alanine.

Used for: Short-duration maximal exercise.

The claim: The mechanisms responsible for muscle fatigue are still highly controversial, but one factor is thought to be increasing levels of acidity in the muscles. This is particularly relevant for short (one to two minutes) bursts of intense effort. Beta-alanine is taken orally to increase levels of a substance called carnosine in your muscles. Carnosine’s primary function is to buffer the acidity in muscle cells, delaying fatigue and enhancing power. (Another way of buffering the acid is to take baking soda, which has also proven to be effective but can cause diarrhea.)

The evidence: It’s clear from many studies that beta-alanine does help buffer muscle acidity. What’s less clear is how this translates to performance benefits. The short, high-intensity bursts of effort are most relevant to elite athletes in events like the 800-metre run, which lasts just under two minutes, and are less relevant to most recreational athletes. However, an interesting study in the upcoming April issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise shows that beta-alanine can also help sprint performance at the end of a long endurance race. The double-blind study had cyclists take part in a 110-minute simulated race, then do a 10-minute time trial and a 30-second sprint. Those who had received eight weeks of beta-alanine improved their final sprint by 11.4 percent.

The verdict: This supplement fills a specialized niche: only fairly serious competitive athletes are likely to have interest in it. But there’s no denying the appeal of having a little extra gas in the tank for a finishing kick — or the significant mental edge that is gained by believing you have some extra gas left in the tank. Clearly, there’s still more research to be done on things like dosage (the cycling study, for the record, started at 2 grams per day and gradually ramped up to 4 grams per day), but there appears to be a real effect here.

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Why an exercise pill will never work

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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On Friday, the second part of my series on athletic supplements will run in the Globe (see the first part here). Over the next few days, I’m going to post some information on other supplements that I couldn’t fit into the newspaper pieces — and believe me, there are plenty more!

Before I do that, though, I wanted to highlight a very interesting paper on “exercise mimetics” that appears in this month’s issue of Nutrition Reviews, by John Hawley (an Australian researcher who is one of the titans of research into nutrition and athletic performance) and John Holloszy. It’s a review of the adaptations within skeletal muscles and organs caused by exercise, trying to determine whether comparable benefits could ever be produced by an “exercise pill.” Martin Gibala, a top-notch research at McMaster University, pointed the paper out to me after reading this passage from my last column:

Last summer, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California made a splash by announcing an exercise pill that allowed mice to gain the benefits of vigorous exercise – all without setting a paw on their exercise wheels…

Hawley and Holloszy beg to differ. Continue reading “Why an exercise pill will never work”

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Magic pills

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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New Jockology out today: it’s the first of a two-part series on popular supplements thought to be ergogenic (performance enhancing). Actually, it could have been a 27-part series — there’s a ton of pills and powders out there that people believe in — but I tried to focus on substances with some legitimate research behind them. This week: antioxidants, omega-3 fatty acids, and creatine (read the column here).

Last summer, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California made a splash by announcing an exercise pill that allowed mice to gain the benefits of vigorous exercise – all without setting a paw on their exercise wheels. That era hasn’t yet arrived for humans, but strolling down the aisle of any drugstore makes it clear that we’re very interested in pills whose claims include faster, higher and stronger.

So, which key ones did I miss? Which ones should I cover in part 2?