One of the first statements usually made by a professional or collegiate athlete accused of taking banned or performance-enhancing substances is that he or she thought they were taking a dietary supplement. At the college level, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) recently amended its governing Constitution to include a rule created to dispel the cloud of confusion between legal and illegal supplements.
 
As of August 1, all Division I institutions will be required to designate a staff member to answer student-athlete and staff questions about dietary supplements and NCAA banned drugs. In addition, a separate but related proposal was also designed to obligate institutions to educate athletics department staff members who have regular interaction with student-athletes about the NCAA list of banned drug classes and to advise them that any nutritional supplement use may endanger a student-athlete’s health and eligibility.

The NCAA said any questions about the new policy can be directed to the Resource Exchange Center, a service of the National Center for Drug Free Sport and the NCAA’s third party drug-testing administrator. The Resource Exchange Center provides both a toll-free number and website for NCAA student-athletes and athletics administrators to contact with questions about medications, supplements and NCAA banned drugs.
 
Prior to the newly enacted rule, NCAA required student-athletes to sign a drug-testing consent form, with the warning that “dietary supplements are not well regulated, may contain NCAA banned substances and are taken at the student-athletes’ own risk.” To err on the side of caution, the NCAA encouraged student-athletes to check with their designated staff member before consuming any substance other than food.
 
“The safest approach for student-athlete health and eligibility would be to avoid the use of unregulated dietary supplements,” commented Mary Wilfert, NCAA associate director for health and safety. “We encourage institutions to support this approach since there is no way to guarantee purity and safety of any supplement product.”
 
Rather than offering additional comments about the potential health benefits of supplements as they relate to promoting the health of athletes, the NCAA referred Nutraceuticals World to its official Sports Medicine Handbook, which contains an entire subsection devoted to Dietary Supplements.
 
The subsection covers a variety of topics, warning athletes against supplements that are marketed toward student-athletes for the purposes of improving “performance, recovery time and muscle-building capability.”
 
The handbook also warned student-athletes about the harm of supplements that lack “proof of effectiveness,” and cited an over-arching concern for “the lack of regulation and safety in the manufacture of dietary supplements,” especially as it relates to compounds obtained from specialty nutrition stores and mail order businesses that skirt FDA purview.
 
The handbook instead provides a primer on basic nutrition, explaining for example how carbohydrate- and protein-containing foods and beverages can be used during training and competition.
 
The handbook also seemed to discourage the use of vitamins and minerals, at least as it related to performance-enhancing purposes. “Most scientific evidence shows that selected vitamins and minerals will not enhance performance provided no deficiency exists,” the manual stated, citing vitamins E, C and beta-carotene as key supplements that are misused by athletes who hope to gain protection from “the damaging effects of aerobic exercise.”

The handbook additionally discounted the ability of chromium to increase muscle mass and decrease fat; magnesium’s ability to prevent cramps; and carnitine and other herbal/enzyme formulations’ ability to provide performance-enhancing benefits. “Ultimately, most nutritional supplements are ineffective, costly and unnecessary,” according to the handbook, which cited the potential of a placebo effect—i.e., student athletes take supplements/substances, train harder and believe the supplement enhanced their performance.

The NCAA currently bans products that fall into the following drug classes: stimulants, anabolic agents, alcohol and beta blockers, diuretics, street drugs, peptide hormones and analogues, anti-estrogens and beta-2 antagonists.  

Finally, the NCAA handbook warned student athletes to use supplements at their own risk, advising that it’s probably best not to risk their eligibility status on “products that have not been scientifically proven to improve performance and may contain banned substances,” as well as on products that may contain NCAA banned substances.