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Trade group establishes youth supplement guidelines
Sports medicine specialist said that physicians must offer direction to young patients.
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WASHINGTON — The Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade association for the dietary supplement industry, has released a set of guidelines regarding sports nutrition supplement use for athletes aged 18 and younger in an attempt to arm the medical community and those in positions of authority with easily accessible information.
The guidelines, devised by the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), place sports nutrition supplements into three categories of safety: green lights (safe), yellow lights (use with caution) and red lights (potentially dangerous).
Products receiving green light designations include sport beverages, protein powders and energy bars. Yellow light products include creatine and other products that affect muscle function or recovery for which insufficient long-term effects in youth have been documented. Red light products are those that are steroid hormone precursors and products containing ephedrine alkaloids.
Good nutrition, enhancing performance
“Many of the sports groups as a matter of principle, apart from science, urge that young athletes should not be using anything to enhance their performance since the whole purpose of youth sports is exercise and competition,” said Annette Dickinson, PhD, acting president of the CRN. “The difficulty with taking that as a position is that … it’s very difficult to draw the line between what is normal nutrition and what is performance enhancing.
Sports community
Jordan D. Metzl, MD, medical director of the Sports Medicine Institute for Young Athletes at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, said that it is important for the sports medicine community to educate themselves about supplement efficacy.
He said that physicians have to stop ignoring the potential problems of supplement use and start getting involved with their young patients, their parents and their coaches in a proactive manner.
“I think that if the medical and sports medicine community doesn’t aggressively take on this issue, we’re going to have more problems down the line,” Metzl said. “What we have seen in the past, for example, is that when anabolic steroids first came out, the medical community tried to convince athletes that these products didn’t work, even though athletes who were using them knew this to be untrue. Education needs to be really pushed on all levels, including parents, coaches and kids.
“Nutritional supplements, particularly creatine and (androstenedione), have never been studied in children. We have no idea what the safety of these products may or not be for kids and therefore, I feel that they should universally be discouraged.”
Although under the CRN guidelines creatine is described as a yellow light supplement, Metzl said he would never OK its use by young athletes.
“My feeling on that is that it is a slippery slope,” Metzl said. “When you give permissiveness to one thing, it kind of gives justification to do other things. Creatine has never been studied under the age of 18 in anybody so to say that it’s OK or it’s a yellow light is, in my opinion, irresponsible.”