Discussion: Another study slams vitamin supplements for athletes

I may be discontinuing my morning C and E pills: Researchers in Germany announced the results of another study on the body's reaction to exercise, according to an article in today's NYTimes.

...Exercise is known to have many beneficial effects on health, including on the body's sensitivity to insulin. "Get more exercise" is often among the first recommendations given by doctors to people at risk of diabetes....[However we have found that if] you exercise to promote health, you shouldn't take large amounts of antioxidants...antioxidants in general cause certain effects that inhibit otherwise positive effects of exercise, dieting and other interventions.

The effect of vitamins on exercise and glucose metabolism "is really quite significant," said Dr. C. Ronald Kahn of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, a co-author of the report. "If people are trying to exercise, this is blocking the effects of insulin on the metabolic response." The advice does not apply to fruits and vegetables even though they are high in antioxidants, the many other substances they contain presumably outweigh any negative effect...

I believe the key phrase here is "If you exercise to promote health." I don't. I exercise to get faster (or, at my age, keep from getting too much slower). My blood sugar runs closer to hypoglycemic than diabetic (usually in the low 60's), so interfering with insulin is the least of my concerns. That said, I've never found it necessary to take vitamin supplements - I've had a diet very high in vegetables since my early 20's. I hated veggies as a kid, but when I started putting in serious time training, I suddenly found myself craving them. Seems the body knows what it needs - just have to listen.

The NY Times is on a crusade against vitamin supplements, highlighting recent discoveries in how some vitamins may not be all good for you, all the time, all the while not mentioning long-established research on the merits of vitamins.

So we gotta eat steak?

No. Just skip the vitamins...and 70% of the rest of the food you normally eat, according to a British study:

...Experts have long known that a sure way to increase the age-span of almost any animal is to put it on a semi-starvation diet. Rats and monkeys forced to subsist on 30 to 40 per cent of their normal intake have clearer arteries, lower levels of inflammation, better blood-sugar control and are less susceptible to damage of cells in the brain....

"...Our basic metabolism was set up when we were hunter-gatherers. The pattern would have been a mixture of feast and famine. Maybe we'd go several days without food, then splurge when a supply was found. We not only get much less exercise than our distant ancestors, but having a regular food supply as opposed to an intermittent one may prove to be almost as damaging...."

Our basic metabolism was set up when we were hunter-gatherers

I am sorry to have to call the BS of the life-extenders on this one. How far back do you go to justify the words "set up"? What about the basic metabolism of apes living in a jungle with abundant food? The basic metabolism of a single-cell creature in the proto-ocean? Species adapt on time spans much less than the span from hunter-gatherers to abundant food; witness dogs. True, some mechanisms are more fundamental than others and take longer time to adapt to. And I don't dispute the results of calorie-restriction experiments; you can't dispute data; less food means longer lifespan, up to a point. It's just the periodicity of food intake that I take issue with, and the use of speculative arguments like the above to justify anything scientific.

Vlad, I trust you weren't expecting scientific validity or cogent arguments on this board? But, I do have to give you props for wading in.

Everybody kmows that the way to live long is to eat yogurt. I mean, what better proof could you want than those Dannon commercials featuring the old people in Soviet Georgia?

so i'm training hard all week where i need to intake give or take 3-5,000 kcals a day to maintain my weight and their telling me to eat less..... Been already 10kg under weight i can see that not working out to well!

No such thing as a runner 10kg underweight. Thin is good.

...Our basic metabolism was set up when we were hunter-gatherers...

I dont know anything about antioxidants, but I managed to convince myself this is true, but the hunter-gatherers likely had a higher food intake. As "evidence", improved/increased nutrition in all countries has made people bigger and stronger in the last 200 years. How could this be unless we were preadapted? Especially now the obesity crisis suggests we seem to have reached the limit in the west.

The nice people at the National Academy of Science agreed with me, though I admit they may just have liked the pictures.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8714.full.pdf+h...


... thin is good ...
Nope. Thin is fast in the short term, good is subjective.

Where is AttackPoint headed that we can't take fast=good as axiomatic?

Since we are mostly grumpy, middle-aged men here, I suppose we can accept thin=fast=good as OK. But I certainly hope any driven teenage girls will shut their eyes when reading this, as the Female Athlete's Triad remains a serious issue.

Fine, fast is good.
Being faster than all those guys who are/were thin is schadenfreude...
Not seeing the folk who used to be thin, and now can't run is crap...

Fatter, older & grumpier than you (and probably faster too)

there is growing evidence that antioxidant overuse (read typical vitamin pills) are bad as they inhibit cell signalling transcription factors (read normal adaptation). specific relevance to athletes here.

this is distinctly different to pathological conditions.

Tundra/Desert: Have you seen the long established scientific evidence that vitamins are good? If so, let me know, I am trying to put some literature together on it now.

Fat Rat have you looked in the AIS library yet? They might have some long established scientific evidence that vitamins are good. If not im sure they could help you search.

cheers, thats just it, there isn't much (any?) research. research only shows that vitamin poor diets are detrimental, not that vitamins are useful outside this predicament. the research shows the opposite, that is they can be bad and restrict adaptation.

any individual articles that I may have missed would be appreciated though.

Hemila H. Vitamin C and common cold incidence: a review of studies with subjects under heavy physical stress. Int J Sports Med. 17 (5), 379–83 (1996).

I think there have been several follow-ups, all establishing or re-establishing pretty much the same thing: megadoses of C don't do much for regularfolk, but help prevent colds in people whose immune system is under stress that stems from physical exercise in excess of average.

Tim Noakes is pretty long-established (his Lore book is in fourth edition). He's never been a believer, and he even does science too.
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/47/2/192
Mind you, Linus Pauling has a couple of Nobels, which is as established as you can get!

So I think its fair to say there's a long established lack of agreement on this one.

While I still maintain you're better off getting your vitamins from a good diet as opposed to supplements, I think the Noakes et al study above is answering the wrong question. It's not a matter of vitamins making you faster, but rather if such supplements help ward off illness. I'm not sure why they wouldn't have measured the incidence of sickness while they already had the subject groups under observation. Seems like a missed opportunity there.

ok, I agree it depends on how we think the vitamin supplementation should work.

I agree that vitamins are likely to reduce the risk of illness (whilst you are on them only), especially in those training very hard, and draining their immune system. there is no study looking at doing everything else to try and preserve immune function vs vitamin supplementation. What I mean is most athletes training very hard could improve their immune function by doing other things better (e.g. CHO/protein intake immediately after hard training sessions, avoiding public areas in the few hours after a hard training session, ensuring adequate sleep, etc).

But the point of all this new research is that vitamin supplementation can prevent positive adaptation from training. That is, if you take supplements, you risk reducing the benefits from each training stimulus. You will run slower (after 3 months training for example) or you will still be a diabetic (in the extreme example after 3 months training) if you take supplements at the same time.

there is a balance between the right amount of free radicals and nitrogen species (positive cellular signalling and adaptation) and too much (cellular damage - disease, aging & immune dsyfunction). not enough and you block normal cell functioning which can also be very bad (disease, no adaptation)

I guess you then have to weight up the pros and cons - risk getting sick (which to be honest is only for the real hardcore, and they could do something about probably anyway) or risk having ineffecient training.

at some stage i don't doubt they will be able to individualise the supplement needs of individuals from a simple test and then prescribe specific dosages for the best of both worlds.