Sports nutrition ingredients: why are they so bloody hard to find?

Sports nutrition ingredients: why are they so bloody hard to find?

Sports nutrition ingredients are often well hidden, because many companies would rather you didn't read them

The whole point of sports nutrition done right is that someone else has done the brainwork to bring together the finest performance ingredients for you in one handy product. The ingredients aren't just a part of this, they're ALL of it. They are the only part that will benefit - or harm - your performance, and the precise combination of the right ingredients is exactly what you are paying for. 

So why is it that with so many manufacturer's websites it's so bloody hard to find out what ingredients have gone into a product?

By law any company producing food must declare the ingredients inside their products in any marketing (websites, etc) and on the packaging. 

You'll find ours here. We're very proud of them.

If you were less proud of your ingredients however, you might want to make them harder to find by hiding them. 

Clearly outright hiding, as in stuffing them under the sofa and sitting on them, is out. 

You could still make them very difficult to find though by keeping them in an obscure place on your website, maybe in a different format, and by placing various pages and tabs in front of them, not to mention plenty of bright, obvious copy with the messages you'd prefer people read to stop them from looking much further.

Surely no one would do this? 

Sorry but most of the sports nutrition industry is at it. We are a rare exception to a shitty rule. 

Here's an example - and we could have picked from plenty - Maximuscle's Maxifuel Viper Boost Bar. Open up the webpage for this and you'll quickly learn how it 'boosts mental focus' and is made using the 'latest sports science'. 

But no ingredients.

Click on the 'nutrition' tab and... 

Nope, not there either. 

Not even under the 'other ingredients' heading. 

Weird.

Look below this tab and you'll find a message asking you to "use the alternative views" for ingredients. 

There appears a nondescript PDF, with no download instructions. But click on it, and bingo, a download which brings up the full label in a font so small Superman would struggle to read it.

 

Sports nutrition ingredients

 

 

Pass the magnifying glass: assuming you did ever find this, can you read those ingredients? Us neither

 

But why would a company as sophisticated as Maximuscle be using a barely legible pdf download for their ingredients?

Maybe they don't want people reading them, because when you do finally get there, this 'elite' bar is actually made of:

Sucrose, rice flour, dark chocolate, almonds, maltodextrin, fructose syrup, glucose syrup, cereal, more sugar, caffeine* and guarana*

Oh. It's just a nutty chocolate bar. Like Cadbury's Boost.

'Latest sports science'? A bit of guarana? 

Cadbury's even beat them to that, sticking it in their own Boost years ago:

Sports nutrition ingredients boost guarana

The only real innovation from Maximuscle in this case appears to be the price - three times that of a regular Boost bar, despite being 25% smaller. No wonder those ingredients were so hard to find.

*As guarana contains caffeine, these may not be separate ingredients

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