Supplements

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I subscribe to lots of different communications, and I read everything. I especially enjoy reading and learning about supplements and foods.

It i s important to remember that anyone can write a book, a website, heck even a blog! You need to carefully consider your sources, especially if you plan on incorporating any of their advise into your life.

Supplements are fascinating to me, actually it is the marketing of them that I find most interesting. Companies spend billions of dollars just to get us to use their "amazing miracle supplement" and people will take them without even researching what is in them and what they may do to their bodies.

Everyone seems to be looking for that one pill they can take so they don't have to do any exercise or diet. I know people who will drink alcohol everyday, eat fast food and garbage then spend hundreds of dollars on some "revolutionary" new work out system and useless supplements, and they don't know why they don't have a body like the ones they see on the TV ads, or in the magazines hawking these products. These are intelligent people! Why do they do this?

Most people don't even think about what "supplement" means. Here is a definition:

–noun
1. something added to complete a thing, supply a deficiency, or reinforce or extend a whole.
–verb (used with object)
5. to complete, add to, or extend by a supplement.
6. to form a supplement or addition to.
7. to supply (a deficiency).

Do you read anything in these definitions that says "replaces"? Nope, me either. If they really thought about what "supplement" means, they would know that supplements need to be used along with proper nutrition and exercise. And if you were ever considering taking anabolic steroids, you simply cannot just takes those and expect growth, you still need to practice proper nutrition and follow a rigorous exercise routine.

I will read a lot about anything before I decide to put it into my body and spend my hard earned money on it.

I usually check to see if a "meta-analysis" has ever been published on a supplement. What exactly is a meta-analysis? Here is another definition:

Meta-analysis is a statistical technique for amalgamating, summarising, and reviewing previous quantitative research. By using meta-analysis, a wide variety of questions can be investigated, as long as a reasonable body of primary research studies exist. Selected parts of the reported results of primary studies are entered into a database, and this "meta-data" is "meta-analyzed", in similar ways to working with other data - descriptively and then inferentially to test certain hypotheses.

Meta-analysis can be used as a guide to answer the question 'does what we are doing make a difference to X?', even if 'X' has been measured using different instruments across a range of different people. Meta-analysis provides a systematic overview of quantitative research which has examined a particular question.

The appeal of meta-analysis is that it in effect combines all the research on one topic into one large study with many participants.

I like Will Brink, he has a lot of opinions of many supplements and will tell you exactly what he has researched and whether or not he would spend his money on them. This is a goofy video he posted on his site about this same topic.


The Brink Zone