Thomas Gerlach wrote:
swimtotri wrote:
Based on your Promo code for BASE Performance, can you share why you would trust/use their products?
I am sure Matt Miller would be happy to chime in. Frankly I would have never thought salt would be a contaminated product. I am still very surprised. Now that I guess it is possible I do like that a whole bunch of pros use the product. While I use the product there are also so many pros who don't disclose they use it. While I haven't benen drug tested since 2013 I know lots of the others are getting tested.
On that note I don't even think I declared Salt as a supplement on my drug testing declaration sheet in 2013. I was on Salt Stick then.
While I don't have hard numbers I might venture to guess that Base is nearing to be the major player in salt in Ironman racing and I of course would like to see NSF certification. In fact it has me rethinking my position entirely that cGMP is not good enough that it also must be NSF. The only NSF product I take for sure is Powerbar BetaAlanine. But I will look to others in the future. These cases should be a wake-up for all pros.
Do you retain un-opened bottles of supplements as a precaution for future testing? If I was a pro and using supplements, I would.
Personally, I'm not surprised that salt tablets would be contaminated. Most supplement manufacturing is contracted out to contract research organizations (CRO's) based on lowest cost. Where are these CRO's? Many of them are in places like India, China, etc. What's the quality control like at the CRO? If the last batch of material that went through the tableting machine, was a contaminated batch of "Mr Max's Muscle Super Booster", well, then there's a chance that the next tableting run will be contaminated if the machine wasn't cleaned properly. One way to get around this is to do all manufacturing in-house. You should also have an analytical group with QA/QC to check the quality of the raws entering your site (e.g. is the salt, really 100% salt).
I looked at the websites of a couple supplement companies. None of them disclose any information on manufacturing or what they are doing regarding quality control. Most of them have athlete testimonials, but nothing on how often they test the finished product for composition or contamination. Personally, If I'm going to take a supplement or nutritional item (e.g. gel), I only use items from companies that I think are large enough to manufacture in-house (e.g. gels, it's Clif, Powerbar, Gu only).