Supplements: Then & Now

"If It Tastes Like Crap, It Must Be Good!"

In this modern age there are 1,000s of super duper supplements flying around the bodybuilding landscape: products for pre training, while training, post training, stuff to get up in the middle of the night for (good practice for when you and your prostate get older). It’s all good and these supplements do enhance performance but such a cornucopia of goodies were not always available.

When I first started to go to bodybuilding shows in 1969 there would be a couple of tables in the foyer selling lifting belts or protein powder. It was in the days before mass production of supplements so the vendor selling protein powder would show up with the powder in primitive polythene bags maybe holding 20 pounds each. You would go up and order a couple of pounds worth and he would scoop it into a smaller polythene bag and you would walk off with your prize holding it like it contained goldfish. It was impossible to mix, tasted like crap, was probably full of sugar, but we lapped it up. In fact in later years my supplement test was “If it tastes like crap, it must be good.”

Living in Nottingham in the UK there was no GNC or any major supplement retailers around in those days. So for other supplements we used to go to the Little London Herbal Store in Trinity Square, which had some exotic wares plus some that could aid bodybuilding performance. One was Casilan a low calorie high protein powder that was designed for people convalescing from illness. I used to heap several spoonfuls into a pint glass of water then add six raw eggs, stir it all together, which took some time but was a helluva cardio workout. A couple of times I got a really bad cramps and my stomach swelled up so painfully and alarmingly that I’d look down and try and decide whether to call the midwife or audition for the remake of Alien taking John Hurt’s gut busting role. Another favorite supplement of that time was desiccated liver tablets. I’d take 20 or 30 at a time and your mouth felt like three incontinent parrots had been living in it for a month.

My “tastes like crap, it must be good” anthem was to the fore back in 2004 when FLEX magazine were investigating bringing out their own range of supplements. A group of us met in a conference room and the guy in charge of the project brought in different flavors of protein powders. There was vanilla, strawberry, chocolate and raspberry. We all tasted them and then announced our preference. My colleagues gushed over the taste of chocolate and vanilla. When it came to my turn I said, “Raspberry is the best.” They asked why and I replied (I think you know what’s coming) “Because if it tastes like crap it must be good.”

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