Tag: supplements

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Vitamin D and sports: overhyping a strong case

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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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The current issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise has an article called “Athletic Performance and Vitamin D,” a topic that ignited some mild controversy when I dealt with it in a Jockology column back in March. The authors review five lines of evidence in support of their hypothesis that vitamin D helps athletic performance. In particular, they focus on a series of German studies from the 1940s and 50s showing that ultraviolet irradiation improved athletic performance, and on the spectacularly unsurprising result that athletes seem to be fitter in the summer (when vitamin can be produced from sunshine) than in the winter. Tellingly, they include this caveat about studies of vitamin D deficiency:

No attempt was made to associate athletic performance with 25(OH)D levels (a measure of vitamin D levels) in these four studies—or any study that we could locate.

Continue reading “Vitamin D and sports: overhyping a strong case”

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Caffeine: is it all in your head after all?

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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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Caffeine, as we’ve noted before, is probably the most versatile and powerful legal performance enhancer out there. Researchers can’t seem to find enough good things to say about it. And one of its most head-scratching properties is that it appears to give as much of a boost to habitual users as it does to caffeine virgins. But a new study in the journal Psychopharmacology offers a rare discordant voice. Continue reading “Caffeine: is it all in your head after all?”

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More caffeine: it kills pain, even in habitual users

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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A new study from the University of Illinois finds yet another way that caffeine boosts performance. Twenty-five cyclists performed intense half-hour exercise sessions, after consuming either a caffeine pill or a placebo; the caffeine group experienced less pain in their quadriceps. Interesting, but not earth-shattering, since we already knew that caffeine is probably the most versatile and powerful legal performance enhancer out there.

What’s most notable is this:

“What we saw is something we didn’t expect: caffeine-naïve individuals and habitual users have the same amount of reduction in pain during exercise after caffeine (consumption),” [said lead researcher Robert Motl].

This is the phenomenon discussed last week: even if you drink several cups of coffee a day, you’ll still get the same performance boost from a caffeine pill that a complete abstainer will. (And it may even work better for you, since you won’t be knocked off-balance by caffeine’s effects.) Nobody’s really sure why it works this way, but the Illinois study provides more evidence that it’s true.

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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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Supplements, part two

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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)

***

The second part of the Jockology series on supplements is now up on the Globe and Mail site, taking a look at probiotics, vitamin D and ZMA. I expect to get some disagreement on this one — ZMA, in particular, has a very strong following, and vitamin D is the hottest supplement on the planet these days. In both cases, it seems clear that correcting deficiencies can have an enormous effect, both on performance and on health in general. But the existing research hasn’t convinced me that athletes need more than anyone else.

That being said, these questions are far more complex than the “true” or “false” labels that appear in the newspaper column. So if you think I’ve missed some key information or gotten it wrong, let me know!