Manufacturers of Sports Nutrition Products Must Safeguard Consumer Trust
Suzane Leser, Nutrition Manager for Lifestyle Ingredients at Volac, said: “Unfortunately, sports nutrition products are sometimes included within a single generic descriptor ‘supplements’, which in turn has been associated with failed drug tests.”
29 May 2012 --- Last month’s ruling that the British Olympic Association’s lifetime Olympic ban is non-compliant with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) code, once again puts the spotlight on the use of banned substances for performance enhancement, and will no doubt continue to do so around the Games themselves.
It also serves to highlight the challenge faced by manufacturers of reputable sports nutrition products, including sports drinks and protein products, in distancing their brands from association with banned substances and supplements.
Suzane Leser, Nutrition Manager for Lifestyle Ingredients at Volac, said: “Unfortunately, sports nutrition products are sometimes included within a single generic descriptor ‘supplements’, which in turn has been associated with failed drug tests.”
“In fact, in this context, there are three tiers of products that make up the loosely defined group ‘supplements’:
• Banned pharmaceutical products which are deliberately used as performance enhancers
• Supplements containing substances such as caffeine, creatine and nitric oxide, which are not banned by WADA but can nevertheless affect performance
• Sports nutrition products which offer a convenient way for sports people to meet their energy and nutrient needs – which can be significantly higher than those of people who are not in training
“Should an incident take place there is a real risk that consumers may not differentiate reliable sports nutrition products from performance enhancing supplements containing banned substances. As a result, manufacturers of products carrying genuine claims, evidenced by science, and with rigorous production standards to avoid inadvertent contamination, must work hard to safeguard consumer trust in their brands.”
As sports nutrition products are targeted at athletes, reputable manufacturers, like Volac, carry out an additional layer of testing, over and above rigorous food safety testing, to minimise the risk of any inadvertent contamination with banned substances.
Leser continues: “All athletes and serious sports people, whether elite or not, need to feel sure that any sports nutrition products they consume are safe and ‘legal’ within their sporting code. An additional layer of testing means these products can be consumed by athletes with greater confidence than regular foods, particularly as some banned substances have been found within a foodstuff due to provenance. Take the case of Alberto Contador, for example, who was banned for testing positive for clenbuterol, which appears regularly in the food chain in contaminated meat.”
In April 2010, Volac became the first raw ingredients supplier to adopt the Informed-Sport quality assurance programme for sports nutrition products. Two years on, it firmly believes that working with Informed-Sport offers manufacturers of sports nutrition products a practical way to minimise risk of contamination as well as maximising detection opportunities, before the product reaches the consumer.
Catherine Judkins , Business Development Manager at HFL Sport Science, which owns the Informed-Sport programme, said: "There is no doubt that there are a number of so-called 'supplements' on the market that contain banned substances as listed ingredients, as well as those that are deliberately adulterated with banned substances to give them a performance benefit.
“However, these products should not be confused with high quality sports nutrition products made by reputable manufacturers. HFL's Informed-Sport programme was set up to help sports nutrition companies ensure that their products are safer for athletes and serious sports people to use.
“Reputable manufacturers and suppliers can register their products and ingredients with the programme, which involves a rigorous auditing process followed by regular testing by our world class sports doping control laboratory. This helps minimise the risk that products could be inadvertently contaminated with trace amounts of banned substances.”
Registered products and ingredients are permitted to use the Informed-Sport logo on packaging, making them easy to identify by athletes and other consumers as high quality products.
In 2011, HFL tested 2702 Informed-Sport samples from across the industry; only 0.2% of final products screened showed inadvertent contamination. This compared favourably to an HFL survey in 2008 which showed steroid and/or stimulant contamination in one-in-10 non-tested products.
Leser continues: “Volac has over 40 years experience in specialist whey protein production, and over ten specifically in the sports nutrition market. Rigorous testing has always been part of our quality assurance procedures. But we cannot rest on our laurels. We owe it to our customers to ensure the integrity of our whey protein for their formulations. By meeting the highly sensitive and sector-specific testing requirements of Informed-Sport, even trace amounts of banned substances would be identified in the Volactive range of nutritional whey protein concentrates and isolates.”
As the world focuses on London this summer the range of banned substances is wider than ever and the methods of detection increasingly sophisticated. Adherence to the Informed-Sport standard offers manufacturers of sports performance products one way of minimising the risk of their products hitting the headlines for the wrong reasons.
