Popping Pills: Vitamins and Other Supplements for Runners

Bee pollen, ginseng, beta carotene, chromium, brewer’s yeast—the list of wonder substances that are supposedly going to dramatically improve your health and performance is endless. We Americans are always looking for that magic pill that’s going to help us lose weight, feel great, have more energy, and, what the hey, why not have it prevent baldness and improve our sex lives at the same time. But the truth is that you can’t eat your way to being fit any more than you can eat your way to a college degree or a successful career. These achievements all take a lot of steady, hard, and sometimes not terribly exciting work. Yet the nutritional supplement industry, to the tune of more than $4 billion a year, has somehow convinced people that health and fitness can be achieved differently.

Vitamins and other supplements are often marketed as energy boosters or some such vague claim. Problem is, vitamins and minerals don’t provide energy. Food does. More specifically, the calories in food do. Only foods and drinks that contain calories provide energy.
What do vitamins and minerals do, then? Vitamins are like your body’s spark plugs—they are catalysts to reactions within your body. Minerals are elements that form and regulate the body. If your car wasn’t firing properly, you might get the spark plugs fixed. But once you got your spark plugs up to normal operating level, you wouldn’t throw four more under the hood and expect your car to run better. You would just be wasting your money with your misunderstanding of what keeps your car moving down the road day after day. Same thing goes for taking vitamins beyond the base level needed for good health. No studies have found increased performance in runners who take megadoses compared to runners who have a normal intake. In fact, no studies have shown increased performance caused by any of these kinds of supplements, be they vitamins, minerals, or substances not even recognized as necessary for normal human functioning, such as bee pollen. The right nutrition for good performance is pretty much the same as it is for good health, regardless of your level of activity.

Most nutritionists would say that it’s OK to take a daily multivitamin as a sort of health insurance, but even that shouldn’t be necessary if you regularly eat a wide variety of healthful foods. Vitamins and minerals from food are always better than the same substances from pills. When you get vitamins and minerals from food, you’re more likely to regularly be eating properly. For example, getting enough vitamin C from your diet means that you’re eating a decent amount of fresh fruits and vegetables. Having to meet your vitamin C needs with a pill means that you’re going to be hurting in other areas nutritionally, such as fiber and other disease-protective substances best found in food. Knowing all this information, I still find myself nearly getting hoodwinked once in a while by some smooth talker who promises the key to feeling great. The idea that taking pill X will solve all of your problems is just so appealing. When you hear claims like this, try not to be bamboozled. Claims for any nutritional supplement are almost always bogus if any of the following apply:

• The salesperson creates a nutritional need and then shows how his product fills it. ➤ The product’s manufacturers are portrayed as being persecuted by the Food and Drug Administration and other reputable, mainstream providers of nutrition information.
• The salesperson says that you’re nutritionally deficient without having detailed records of your normal eating habits.
• You’re told that it will make you lose weight without you having to exercise regularly and consume fewer calories.

Be especially skeptical about products that bear celebrity endorsements. These celebrities are almost always being paid to say what the manufacturers of the products want them to.