Baseball.

It’s as simple as that. We now have a consensus that the home run records of Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa were fueled by steroids, the ultimate nutritional supplement. We also know that marginal major league baseball players and 45 year old pitchers have been catapulted to MVP performance levels by steroids.

I am not suggesting that steroids are a good thing, only that they demonstrate that we know for sure that certain nutritional supplements do have a dramatic effect on your body’s performance AND your health. Most of us want to take advantage of the health benefits that nutritional supplements can provide. The biggest concern is the unregulated nature of the supplement market. There is no guarantee that what the label says about those pills is actually what’s inside those pills.  Nor are there guarantees about ingredients or impurities not listed on the label. We don’t know for sure that they are effective or that the negative effects don’t outweigh the positive. There are hundreds of unregulated supplements advertised on the internet and I am sure that most of them are either useless or harmful.

Vitamins and dietary supplements, both those made domestically and those made internationally, do not need to get approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration before they are sold to the public. Nor does the FDA have any regulations establishing a minimum standard of practice for the manufacture of dietary supplements and vitamins.

So how do we decide on which nutritional supplements to take and which brands to buy? The easy way is to get all of your nutrition naturally and forget the supplements. But since I want to lead a vigorous life to at least 100, I want the same advantage that Bobby, Mark and Sammy wanted against the rest of the world. What I am doing is trying to see if there is a consensus on a particular supplement’s benefits by major respected health leaders and if there is scientific evidence to support the claims.  Then when I make a decision  to take a particular supplement, I will try to find a brand that is labeled by a major manufacturing company or retailer in the United States.  I understand the major holes in this method. But until there is some regulation of the supplement market, there is little else that we can do.

In the coming weeks I will share with you the supplements that I think are beneficial. Please share yours with me!