ALL OR NOTHING ?

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?

- Chris Marshall-Bell

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.