As many rounds as possible in 10 minutes of:
5 Jerks (155/100)
7 Burpees
9 Kettlebell Swings (1.5/1 pood)
This time last year… Zack wrote an article on “Grass-fed Cooking”.
Supplements: A Broad Overview
-Glenn Clarke
Around the box over the last several years there have been waves of supplements. Fish oil, BCAAs, caffeine, protein shakes etc. with any new supplement there are always questions, not just about its safety and effectiveness but also the dietary, ethical, and moral legitimacy of their use. As such, I thought it was worth a quick primer on supplementation.
First, supplements are simply products found in food that have been isolated into another form. Gatorade is a carbohydrate supplement. The carbohydrates in Gatorade could be obtained through food, but because eating sugar on the sidelines is probably not an effective strategy; the carbohydrates have been introduced into a solution to make them more readily ingestible. This is the most common reason to make/ use a supplement; the food based version is simply impractical. For instance, a vitamin C supplement allows one to have a large dose of vitamin C without the caloric load to the equivalent amount of fruit. Steroids, chemical amphetamines and the like are not supplements and neither are prescription medications (in general).
So when is a supplement a practical solution? First, when there is a specific, localized deficiency in a known nutrient. This is one of the reasons why we don’t push the multivitamins. A multi gives you a ton of supplements, most of which you don’t need. It is better to log your food and take some standardized screens to determine where your specific deficiency lies.
The second reason is when whole food is not an option/ practical. One great example of this is fish oil. In theory, you could obtain the equivalent fatty acid profile from grass fed beef, high quality fish and nuts. However, this can become very expensive in a hurry. As such, fish oil may be a more practical solution when the food is simply too expensive. Another example is BCAAs. These are basically just pre-digested proteins that are digested faster than a whole protein. You could eat turkey during the work-out, but most people can’t stand to have food in their stomach while working out.
A third reason to take a supplement is that it simply works better than the food option, BCAAs is an example of this. The most common example of this is whey protein. Whey protein is simply one of the two milk proteins. One could drink an equivalent amount of milk; however whey protein will be digested faster, in a smaller volume and cause less gastro-intestinal issues than milk may. In this sense the supplement is more effective than the food.
A final reason to consider a supplement is that the nutrient is not available in your current diet/ climate. Vegetarians have this issue. There are nutrients that are difficult to obtain in a vegetarian diet and these may need to be supplemented (iron as an example). In this same vein is those of us who live in the northern part of the US may find good results from vitamin D, in response to the lower wavelength of sunlight during the winter months.
When should you not use a supplement? When you should be eating food! For example, just because you drink ‘Primal Greens’ doesn’t mean you stop eating veggies. Supplements are made to be used on top of a well-balanced, comprehensive diet. Supplements will never make-up for a diet with holes in it. They have a specific purpose and as they say on the label, they are not a meal-replacement.
So finally, how does one choose a supplement? First and foremost you need to be sure it is ‘safe.’ This can mean different things to different people. Some people are willing to accept a higher level of risk than others and while this is a personal decision you need to be well informed. Second, you need to know if it is empirically effective, on a similar population to yourself. The best example of this is creatine. Creatine is not effective for untrained people; they are developing too fast for the creatine to demonstrate any change. However, in trained (2+ years of barbell training) creatine can and does produce a significant (p>.05) difference over placebo. Third, you have to decide if a supplement is cost effective. My general guideline is that if taking a supplement will reduce the quality of my food intake then it is not worth it. You should never trade food quality for a supplement (contradictory since I talked about fish oil supplementation earlier, but hopefully the point is made). If a supplement is safe, effective but costs $10,000 a month then it is probably not the supplement for you. Again, this is a personal choice. Finally, we always need to come back to the basic question; can I achieve the same result from a food? We always want to choose food if possible.
Hopefully this provided a valuable resource for your supplement decisions. Just remember, there are a ton of coaches here at CFC and likely, we have taken just about everything. Shoot one of us an e-mail, grab us after class, drop a question on the blog. Likely someone else has the same question and we can all learn together.
