“If you’re serious about hitting the gym, you should be just as serious about your nutrition intake. Mutant Mass is in a class all by itself,” reads the product label.
1,060 calories, 16 grams of fat, 176 grams of carbohydrates and 52 grams of protein. This is what can be found in the recommended four scoops of the Mutant Mass branded protein formula.
Lesley Bowlby, a fitness coordinator and trainer at Carleton, has seen this kind of directed marketing for supplements before.
“They have a really great ad campaign out there, convincing everybody that in order to look like the person in their ad, you need their product,” she says.
“Your body does not need these insane amounts of protein,” she says. “What is not used right away is stored as fat.”
“If you’re eating everything that the Canada Food Guide recommends, you shouldn’t need supplements at all. We get all the vitamins and minerals we need from a well balanced diet. An after workout meal should consist of reasonable amounts of protein and carbohydrates,” Bowlby says.
Bruce Marshall is Carleton’s health and wellness manager.
“[The] daily protein requirements of an active individual is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight,” he says.
For example, a male who weighs 175 pounds — equivalent to 80 kilograms — would require 64 grams of protein per day.
A single dose of Mutant Mass contains 52 grams of protein. This accounts for 81 per cent of the recommended protein intake for an entire day.
“There is little government regulation on the supplement industry here in Canada,” Marshall says.
Exercise supplements marketed in Canada must follow the Natural Health Products Regulations — meaning that a health claim must appear on the label of the supplement and it must contain substances deemed acceptable by Health Canada, according to information provided by Tatiana Stankevich, a product licensing submission coordinator at Health Canada.
Ashraf Khattab is a third-year student at Carleton who uses supplements.
He says he feels they provide convenience for those who don’t necessarily have the time to prepare the foods that nutrition experts recommend.
“I find them pretty effective, if you train properly, use them on time and in the way they are meant to be taken,” he said.
Khattab said he spends about $70 every two months on supplements, and considers the expenditure worth it.
Khattab himself is no stranger to the sweeping ads for supplements.
“They do make it sound very appealing, but never mention that to get an optimum result you have to work out regularly, eat right, and sleep right.
Always keep in mind that those supplements are not natural and the body does not accept it normally.”
