Supplements are a HUGE business with even bigger profits so when you are looking to decide how to spend your hard earned dollars on supplements, you need to follow the money. Ask yourself this, is the website/person giving you the advice on what supplements to take benefitting financially from the recommendation? If so, they have a built in bias that you need to be very careful of. “Free supplement advice” can be very costly indeed if it convinces you to buy things you don’t need or things that are ineffective. In my opinion, you should get your advice from someone who does not sell supplements. For example, Will Brink sells a great book called “Bodybuilding Revealed” which has an excellent supplement review and he does not sell supplements so he can give his unbiased opinions. Another good source is the JISSN (Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition), they do not sell anything and their free guide is about as unbiased as they come too … its just a lot harder to read than Will Brink’s guide.
Then there is the “free advice” from places like bodybuilding.com and examine.com. Both of these places make 100% of their revenue from selling supplements. When their entire revenue is obtained from selling supplements, buyer beware. They want you to buy supplements so they can make money. Lets take “testosterone boosters” category for example. Bodybuilding.com has fully two hundred and twenty one products in this category – clearly ridiculous. Examine.com recommends seven for testosterone boosting, a bit more reasonable. Here are the supplements that examine.com recommends for testosterone boosting:
- Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA)
- D-Aspartic Acid
- Vitamin D
- Zinc
- Ginger
- Fenugreek
- Bulbine Natalensis
So, they would love for you to buy all seven of these .. just click on the links and they get an 8-10% referral fee. (For full transparency, I make money of amazon referrals just like they do, the difference is that the one and only supplement I recommend is protein powder.)
Lets go ahead and use JISSN to see which of the above seven that examine.com would have us buying is worth the money. JISSN rates supplements as ‘apparently effective’, ‘possibly effective’, ‘too early to tell’, and ‘apparently ineffective’.
None of examine.com’s seven recommendations was listed as “apparently effective” or “possibly effective”, in other words, these seven products are a waste of money in their view.
The price of “free advice” can be very high indeed if you don’t take it with the appropriate degree of skepticism. In this case, had you blindly bought all seven supplements that examine.com recommended, you could easily be out $200 for a single month’s supply. The Will Brink’s Bodybuilding Revealed book is only $47 and in this case he would have saved you from wasting that $200. Consider spending money to save money!
Supplement Information Sources
Use Extreme Caution:
Highly Recommended:
