Originally Posted by
jjafterdark
I started taking supplements again this year, after many years of avoiding them, believing, as conventional "science" would have it, that basically you were paying for expensive pee.
I realized after 2 to 3 months that this was certainly not the case, and that I was clearly benefitting in a variety of ways. The interesting thing is, since the benefits aren't immediately clear and hence the gains so gradual, there is no 'light bulb' effect: as in "wow this is great." As a result, once you reach a higher plane of health, it just becomes "normal" or "average" as in, something you just take for granted.
Now, as far as the downsides. I am taking a lot of supplements. So many in fact, that it's almost an endurance event finishing them all. It require drinking a lot of water, and it's quite time consuming. I think I've reached my limit in terms of how many supplements I can take, in terms of time and patience.
Cost? I estimate I'm spending $40 to $50 a month but I'm very careful comparing cost and quality so someone who is less invested in research would probably spend considerably more. Compared to the average caffeine addict spending $100 to $200 a month at Starbucks, I don't think the expenditure is that great.
What are your experiences?
Well, I am 75. I did some work for the military many years ago that had to do with programming the detector to measure the presence and density of poison gas. This was used to protect our soldiers while they were recovering those WMD that the leftists said never existed. (We only discovered 100,000 tons of them). In any case you had to put the device inside of a chamber and allow poison gas into it in measured quantities so that I could test the accuracy of my program. I could NOT get it to measure accurately. Up at full strength is was fine but at lower levels, the most dangerous kind, it would not measure correctly. Finally I decided that the physicists were wrong so I dug out the texts on calculus and did all of the work myself and discovered that they were, as usual, full of crap since it wasn't their lives on the line. Coming to work the next day I was excited to test my calculations and I changed the program and I had to get the device out of the gas chamber so I pumped it out. Normally you would pump it out for 45 minutes but since I'm and engineer I know that anything as dangerous as that you ALWAYS give a 100% safety margin. Since I was excited to try it out, I only waited 30 minutes which would have given it a 50% safety margin. I pulled the device out, re-programmed it with the correct calculation and reinstalled it in the chamber and went through the entire process of lowest to highest and indeed it measured absolutely correct. I tested it a dozen times and every time it followed the gas curve with total accuracy.
To make a long story short - since that 45 minute pump-out had been designed by physicists who themselves would never have stepped foot inside of that chamber, they had left no safety margin at all.
I had burned and scarred my lungs with poison gas without even knowing it until the next bike race. Then it became more than obvious since I couldn't keep up with the lantern rouge.
I went to the military pulmonary specialists and they spotted the damage immediately and told me that it would never go away. And as far as I could tell it never did. Then when I had a concussion one of the things they did was an X-ray and CAT scan and said that I didn't have any marks on my lungs! Well that was good but my hematocrit had been low since the original problem and I can barely keep up with the slow guys.
I was taking C3 and iron to try and increase my hematocrit since Lemond had said that is what helped him. It didn't seem to do anything at all for me. Then this EPO-BOOST came along and I started using it. I used it for about 45 days and started getting weaker and weaker and slower and slower. Finally an 88 year old left me so far in the dust he had to stop and wait for me to catch up. I knew that something was really wrong. Looking at the label on that bottle it was nothing more than vitamins and iron and some plant matter which was supposed to be an artificial EPO. But there was no C3 in the list of vitamins and without that you cannot metabolize iron. So I stopped taking it and within a day there was a huge improvement and after 4 days I could honestly say that stuff had been poisoning me probably with iron build up.
Now I take anti-seizure medication for a concussion I sustained and there might be some interactions but that is very doubtful. Whatever is in that stuff is pretty bad over time. Furthermore, before I stopped taking it, I had a complete blood work-up and there was absolutely no change in my hematocrit, red blood cell count etc. I also had a chest X-ray and the specialist said I appeared to have scars in my lungs. Now I can't figure out how Stanford could have missed that.
Furthermore, if you order that EPO-BOOST from them they put you on an "automatic reorder" and it is hell trying to get off of that.
I am still a great deal slower than when I started taking that stuff. I don't know why and riding more doesn't seem to change that. But I suppose that eventually I'll get back to ground zero. I can tell very slight improvements with each ride. Topping the climbs now I'm not completely exhausted. But before I started taking that stuff I would only be miserable for the last couple hundred meters.
My advice it to NEVER take any "magic pills". You have absolutely no idea what this crap might do to you but you could pretty much guess that a well balanced diet would beat anything in a bottle.