Nutritional Supplements

A Northern California company specializing in nutritional supplements for high-end athletes, including Barry Bonds and Marion Jones, was raided Wednesday by two government agencies. Agents from the IRS Criminal Investigations Unit and San Mateo County Narcotic Task Force raided Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) in Burlingame at about 12:30 p.m. Computer technicians were seen entering the building and removing boxes of unidentified items, according to the San Mateo Daily Journal.

Shopping for healthy foods and nutritional supplements on the Internet is easy enough. But is it a safe and wise thing to do? I've often pondered that question as I sorted through the dozens of unsolicited e-mails I receive each week from online health companies promising better health and nutrition. Most of these e-mails come from companies I've never heard of. These electronic missives aren't likely to cease any time soon. Online grocery sales are estimated to reach $10.

Identifying impurities in L-tryptophan nutritional supplements associated with the eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome has been far easier than learning how to treat those afflicted with the painful and potentially fatal disease. Although new cases of the syndrome have declined precipitously after a nationwide recall of tryptophan products last November, many of those afflicted are still severely ill. Treatment "is still a big black box," said Dr. Joseph Duffy of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Carrying that water bottle everywhere? Good for you. But are you ready for the next trend in "healthy" waters? Look for so-called nutraceutical waters to pop up on store shelves this fall, with promotions and labels that tout them as more healthful than plain old bottled water. Instead of the usual hype surrounding the origins of the water itself, these products are about what's been added to them--all sorts of vitamins, herbs, minerals and other nutritional supplements.

There's not much notice given--and that's the point. College athletic directors are told 24 to 48 hours in advance that the NCAA will be on campus administering drug screenings. Teams must assemble with a formal roster in hand, used to randomly pick the men and women to be tested. The procedure has been in place since 1990, started at a time when the NCAA and member schools primarily were trying to ferret out use of illegal street drugs--marijuana, cocaine--or steroids.

There's no evidence that multivitamins do healthy adults much good, but the supplements don't seem to do much harm either, a federal panel said Wednesday. Concluding a three-day conference convened by the National Institutes of Health, the panel called for further studies of multivitamins. Half of adults in the U.S. take multivitamins, helping to push annual sales of nutritional supplements to $23 billion. Dr. J.

If you'd guessed 20 years ago what the "it" drug of the new millennium would be, at least for baby boomers, you probably wouldn't have said a pill made from shellfish shells and cow trachea. The pill -- a combination of glucosamine and chondroitin -- is popular with aging boomers because it may ease the pain of arthritis. It's also the treatment of choice for their beloved aging pets. Can you get any more with-it than that?

If there is a golden rule of nutrition, it is a simple one: Too much of anything is bad for you. Yet, when it comes to amino-acid nutritional supplements, Americans seem to cling more to the creed that if a substance occurs naturally within the human body, one can never have too much of it. That philosophy resulted in the development of an estimated $150-million-a-year market for the amino acid tryptophan in the United States over the last few years.

With a background in music and no formal science training, Victor Conte Jr. struggled for nearly two decades to build a successful sports nutrition company that now counts baseball superstar Barry Bonds, Olympic gold medalists and middle-age weekend warriors among its disciples. But along with endorsements from top athletes and skyrocketing sales of its most famous product, Conte's Bay Area Co-Operative Laboratories left a trail of discontented shareholders, vendors and former employees.

Several readers have sent us questions about flaxseed (a major source of alpha linolenic acid) and alpha lipoic acid, which they obviously think are the same thing. It's easy to get confused by all these chemical names and even easier to get befuddled by the claims made for them by the supplement distributors of the world.