Supplements: What you don’t know (and probably wish you didn’t, after reading this)

The sports-supplement world has many power brokers… They have risen along with an industry that in three decades has grown from a niche business serving iron-heaving behemoths to a broad-based juggernaut with nearly $20 billion in U.S. sales in 2007, according to the Nutrition Business Journal.

Despite the move into the mainstream the industry remains fertile ground for kitchen chemists with little or no formal education in science or nutrition—and in some notorious cases former steroid users and dealers. They help decide what compounds go into the fat-burners, muscle builders and preworkout drinks consumed annually by an estimated 33.5 million Americans…

There is a simple reason that the industry has become, in the words of Darryn Willoughby, director of the Exercise and Biochemical Nutrition Laboratory at Baylor, a Pandora’s Box of false claims, untested products and bogus science. To sell any type of food or drug, a company must submit to scrutiny from the FDA. That scrutiny once applied to supplements such as concentrated milk, egg and soy powders, which fed the demand for nonperishable food additives during World War II. But in 1994 Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), which allowed supplements—broadly defined as vitamins, minerals, herbs, amino acids and other products that don’t contain approved pharmaceutical drugs and don’t claim to treat diseases—to be sold with no proof of effectiveness or safety, and without approval from the FDA. That legislation, heavy with lobbyists’ fingerprints, razed virtually every barrier to entry into the marketplace.

All it takes to become a sports supplement dealer is a little money and a phone call…

Full story in Sports Ilustrated.