Vitamins And Performance*

With much scientific ado about nothing, hundreds of silly single-nutrient studies have been done and continue to be done on athletes, trying to show that this or that vitamin does or doesn't improve~performance. And gaggles of silly professors review these studies, the pro-vitamin camp shouting 'tis, and the antivitamin camp shouting 'tisn't, without ever relating the results to basic principles of nutrition. With a hang of the head I have to admit I've sometimes been guilty myself. So you don't make the same mistake, here's the bottom line.

The typical study of vitamins in sport gives a self-selected group of undergraduates (participating for college credits), an arbitrary amount of a single vitamin or mineral for a few days, or at best, a few weeks. These studies (usually done with your tax money), break the rules of nutrition science so badly, they amount to scientific treason. The perpetrators should be taken out and shot.

All the random assignment, double-blind, repeated crossover, super-controls, and fancy statistics cannot save them. First, they take no account of biochemical individuality. Different athletes have radically different nutrient needs. Champion cyclist Howard Dorfling, for example, soaks up B-complex vitamins like a sponge. But to feed the same doses to his teammates would put every one of them into overload. Megadosing athletes who already have adequate amounts of a nutrient, cannot do anything good. Unless you assess the nutrient status of athletes before you start supplementing (and here I don't mean those wishy-washy dietary analyses that pass for assessment in many journals), you might as well feed them bull pucky.

Second, we have seen throughout this book that nutrients work only in synergy with each other. Arbitrarily increasing one nutrient without increasing at least its principle synergists is useless. I show in Chapter 21, for example, that, even in iron deficient athletes, iron supplementation by itself hardly works at all. To get reasonable results you have to supplement with its principle synergists, folic acid, pyridoxine, ascorbate, tocopherol, cobalamin, and zinc.

Third, the business of nutrition is to build a better body. That has to wait on the physiological dynamics of Nature. Unless there is a turnover of blood cells and muscle cells, so that superior cells can grow in the improved nutrient environment provided by the supplementation, you cannot expect improved performance. Blood cells take three months to turn over, and muscle cells six months.2 The minimum study of vitamins should be at least six months long. Until recently, before this principle was understood, the average length of studies on vitamins in sport was about three weeks. That's like measuring the rainfall in Arizona for three weeks, and wrongly concluding that it doesn't rain there at all.

Of course you might luck out on a tropical storm and wrongly conclude that Arizona is wetter than Oregon. That sometimes happens with vitamins. In a 10-subject trial, one or two subjects might be really deficient in the nutrient under study. In a month their performance booms, dragging the statistics of everyone else into the highly significant zone. All the pro-vitamin buffs immediately shout "told you so," and vitamin X becomes the latest ergogenic fad. Hogwash and flaphoodle!

You have to get down to the nitty-gritty. What really counts is the individual athlete and his individual performance. If two out of ten athletes get a great result and eight do not, you have shown nothing by averaging the performance of the whole group.

The only way to know what's going on is to analyze hundreds of studies minutely, toss out the bad, keep the good, and look for trends in the evidence. That's what we've been doing at the Colgan Institute for the last 18 years.

In this book, I can review only a handful of the studies. What I offer you is representative of the trends of evidence. All that evidence points to one conclusion: vitamins and co-factors are building precise nuts and bolts that fit exactly into pre-drilled holes. The number and size of the holes that you have are as individual as your fingerprints. If any one of the holes is left unfilled, or if there are excess nuts and bolts floating about, then growth, development, and function of your body is impaired, and performance cannot be optimal.

I have shown you that the Recommended Dietary Allowances of vitamins make no allowances for the nutrient demands imposed by exercise. I have shown you that athletes and the general population are deficient in many nutrients, even at the antediluvian levels of the RDAs. And I have shown you that athletes are often severely deficient in relation to the nutrient demands of their training.

Yet ignorance continues to abound. On one hand, conservative physicians and dieticians (often with hidden commercial agendas), continue to push the myth of the good mixed diet as optimal for everyone. This delusion, as yet an unpunished form of malpractice in American medicine, does not occur in animal breeding, because sickness directly affects the bottom line. Breeders know that food is deficient. Supplementation is standard practice.

Dr Burton Kallman, chief scientist of the National Nutritional Foods Association, has calculated that the standard monkey diet in zoos is supplemented with 23 times the RDAs for vitamins and minerals.4 That's what it takes to yield optimum growth and resistance to disease in animals that are our closest relatives. Yet some ignorant sods continue to bleat that humans don't need any of it.

We get plenty of the "good mixed diet" types coming to the Colgan Institute for help. They are the most deficient and the most unsuccessful of athletes. It sickens me to see a lad or lass with great athletic potential, who has wasted years under the influence of some ignorant nutritionist or dietician, who has restricted their development to the mediocre level permitted by our nutrient-poor American food.

On the other hand, there are the vitamin freaks (again, often with hidden commercial agendas), who tout endless variations and combinations of vitamins as ergogenic rocket fuel. It sickens me equally to see athletes popping handfuls of useless pills and powders in the days before competition. Usually they or their coaches have fallen for ads of muscular giants, proclaiming they were 95 lb weaklings and similar ballyhoo, until they took Brand X. All hype and dreams. To indicate how bad the marketplace can be, on 6 May 1992, the New York Department of Consumer Affairs charged six sports supplement companies with deceptive advertising.

Get both idiotic notions out of your mind. Food cannot provide sufficient vitamins to meet the demands of intense exercise. And taking vitamins beyond levels that are sufficient to balance their use during exercise, and tissue growth and maintenance, boosts only the cash flow of the supplement makers.

If you are serious about optimum performance, your job is to use this book to analyze your individual nutrient needs, and then precisely fulfill them. If the task gets too complex, call our hotline (619) 632-7722 for help.

Put nothing in your mouth unless it fits your individual plan. There are no overnight miracle foods and no overnight miracle vitamins. The miracle comes from matching your nutrient needs to your biochemistry and your training, then subjecting the mix to a daily dose of good, hard sweat.

*from Micheal Colgan's "Optimum Sports Nutrition", ISBN 0-9624840-5-9, Advanced Research Press, New York, 1993