ABSTRACT
By nature, athletics demands a competitive attitude. The athletes may desire to outperform the opponent, or the athlete may compete with oneself while striving to maximize personal potential. This drive to succeed has fueled a sustained growth in the market of sports supplements. Many men and women at all levels of prowess use pharmacologic and chemical agents, believing that a specific substance positively influences strength, power, or endurance. Such a quest for reaching maximum physical performance or desirable aesthetics can be traced back to ancient times. For example, ancient athletes of Greece reportedly used hallucinogenic mushrooms and ground dog testicles for ergogenic purposes, while athletes of the Victorian era routinely used caffeine, alcohol, nitroglycerine, heroin, cocaine, and rat poison (strychnine) to gain a competitive edge. Today’s athletes are perhaps more likely than their predecessors to experiment with purported ergogenic aids even though most of them may not have been substantiated. Two key factors important to athletic success are genetic endowment and state of training. At high levels of competition, athletes generally have similar athleticism and have been exposed to similar training methods. Therefore, they are fairly evenly matched. Given the emphasis on winning, many athletes are always searching for a “magic” ingredient that provides them with that winning edge. When such ingredients are harmless, they are only a waste of money, but when they impair
Sports supplements 226 ❚
Summary 244 ❚
can waste athletic potential and cost lives. This chapter will review some of the commonly used nutritional substances and ergogenic products that have been claimed to affect basal metabolism, food consumption, energy transformation, fat utilization, and/or sports performance.
