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12/26/08
The supplement industry is a very fickle one. If you come up with the right idea, you can become a millionaire overnight, as men like Bill Philips managed to do. The market was ripe for a product like creatine. It was marketed very shrewdly and sold as a high-end product. As a result, millions of people chose to use it. At the same time, there were other supplement ideas which had equal or greater scientific potential, but they fell to the wayside for a variety of reasons.
In the early days of supplements, it was truly the Wild West. There were many supplements which were being created by internet gurus with kitchen laboratories. They were supplements, steroids, or maybe something in between. But many of them were highly effective. The government banned many of the substances once they were released and tested, but some slipped through the cracks. Some were allowed to be on the market for 2-3 years, which helped them to become established in the underground laboratories, ensuring they would be around for decades to come no matter what legislation arrived to keep them off the grid. And some found they could break the rules slightly in order to garner a wealth of positive publicity and sales.
In the early days of bodybuilding supplementation and internet communities, there were bulletin boards where many of today’s legends posted regularly. There, they shared ideas for steroids and supplements, traded formulas, and created the foundation for what has become a multi-million dollar empire – bodybuilding supplementation, or the bigger picture, sports nutrition. Some of the member realized early that the success of a man like Bill Philips wasn’t due solely to his superior product or understanding of chemistry. It was due mainly to the perception – from the message boards as well as in many high school and colleges nationwide – that this new product had the ability to greatly improve performance and appearance.
Some unscrupulous supplement salesmen decided to emulate his business model and generate a great deal of buzz for their new products. They didn’t start with an equal product. Instead, they started with a far superior product: anabolic steroids. Yes, many of the early samples of supplements sent to prominent authors and bodybuilding scholars were actually spiked with anabolic steroids to deliver some gains that were, well, on par with steroids. As a result, you had several very mediocre products receiving extremely high favorability ratings and reviews based upon their ability to add size to the user. The word-of-mouth took off very quickly, and the orders piled in. The bulk of the orders didn’t contain any trace of anabolic steroids. No, those doses were reserved for the people doing the evaluations, whose reviews would be used on a massive scale to facilitate new sales.
Today, this practice has been curbed to a great degree thanks to the availability of online laboratories which can conduct compound testing for just a few hundred dollars. If a product seems too good to be true, scientists can now measure exactly why, and quickly detect the presence of steroids. So while the inclusion of AAS in supplement products is an amusing footnote to bodybuilding history, it is a feat which will likely never be replicated again.
