Bottles of Vitamin E are seen in a CVS pharmacy
© AFP/Getty Images/File Mario Tama WASHINGTON (AFP) - In supermarkets, drug stores, specialty stores and commercial gymnasiums, shelf after shelf are laden with all sorts of pills, powders, gels, syrups and creams, each claiming to help heal or stimulate a part of the body.
Most are advertised as completely natural, based on Siberian ginseng, ginkgo biloba, green tea or soy milk and such ingredients. But that doesn't mean they don't have ingredients that can get an athlete banned from his or her sport.
They aren't just for ultra-competitive athletes in training: almost one out of every two Americans consumers regularly at least one such supplement, according to the OFS.
That means a huge industry that took in 20.3 billion dollars in 2004 in the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health's Office of Dietary Supplements.
Twenty percent of users, though, count on them to enhance their sports performance.
And so the products are widely available in sports and fitness centers, marketed next to specialty drinks and high-performance clothing. Some fitness centers have jumped into the lucrative business with their own brands of miracle pills and powders.
People walk past a GNC nutrition store
© AFP/File Brendan Smialowski The problem is that a 1994 law allows these products to be sold without regulation by government agencies overseeing food and drug sales, especially the strict Food and Drug Administration.
So there is no one to make sure these products are safe once they are on the market. Many banned doping products can be found mixed into the unregulated pill, powder and cream supplements, and their labels often don't note such ingredients clearly or completely.
It doesn't matter for the amateurs who buy them. But some top-level athletes who have tested positive for doping substances have claimed that the labels on dietary supplements they consumed did not say they carried illegal ingredients.
US swimmer Kicker Vencill registered positive in 2003 after taking an allegedly contaminated supplement, and was suspended two years. But he sued the supplement producer for inaccurate labelling and won a 500,000 dollar judgement.
US sporting authorities have little sympathy for such claims, however.
"At your own risk!!!" declared the US Anti-Doping Agency earlier this year in its magazine "Spirit of Sport".
"Any athlete using dietary nutritional supplements does so completely at his or her own risk of committing a doping violation, even if the supplements are 'approved' or 'verified'," the agency said.
"Anti-doping rules make the presence of a prohibited substance in an athlete's urine or blood a doping offense regardless of how the substance got there."
To prevent players from getting lost in the supplement jungle, the ATP professional men's tennis circuit has come up with its own solution.
In 2005 it made a deal with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline to supply all supplements for its players that are guaranteed to be legal by doping rules.
©AFP