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Comment by pbj1968 | Hacker News Reader

pbj1968

Heard a talk once by someone that managed nutrition for an NFL team. She said periodically clusters of players would pop positive for meth and inevitably it would be some new supplement that was giving them results and they told all their teammates about it. They’d just tell them to quit using it and move on. Interesting story, possibly true.

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Wait. "some new supplement that was giving them results"? Testing positive for meth?

So, a performance enhancing drug, probably some kind of amphetamine if not straight meth, and it is fine? The story may be true but blaming Amazon sounds like a lousy excuse. Someone must know what he is doing.

And I imagine a lot of nutritionists on teams kind of know what’s going on, but are disincentivized from looking too closely at it unless it could really hurt somebody. Or rather, it could hurt somebody enough for someone to notice immediately or impact their performance in the short term. This is obviously armchair speculation, but I’ve seen it in other industries, time and time again. Everyone kind of knows, but nobody wants to be the squeaky wheel that gets the star player - or major piece of equipment - out of commission.

It's possible the nutritionists are also duped. They know that giving their athletes X mg of Y gives them better performance. They don't know that their particular X supplement is really just sugar pills and meth.

Totally. I highly doubt there’s only one answer here. Though I would expect a nutritionist to know and understand the contents of any supplement they recommend to an athlete.

Any even remotely WADA compliant drug testing uses chromatography, this story is most likely false.

As of a couple years ago the NFLPA doesn’t comply with WADA (the current CBA runs until 2030)

https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/lawandarts/a...

I don't really know the details, but I assume chromatography can detect meth no problem, so I assume that's not the problem with the story. The skepticism on GP's part is mostly that the meth was consumed unwittingly; perhaps that's just the story the players tell. But it seems plausible at least.

Yes a 3-5 min UHPLC/MS (and even a UHPLC/UV which is cheaper) can tell you that. Cost of experiment? $10 (not including human cost) Cost of equipment $200k-$400k for this kind of things. One machine and one operator can analyze hundreds of samples a day (once the sample is ready you don't have to stay in front it is fully automated).

For just detecting Meth there are much faster and cheaper methods. But the one I am talking about has the advantage to also allow for detection of other things like steroids (extremely common in supplements), opioids (same) etc

The only thing it will not work well for is anything inorganic, so if they put lead or chrome salts you will not see them and really small (solvents for example) and really large (proteins, large sugars etc)

The (intentional or unintentional) contamination of dietary supplements with performance-enhancing drugs is a widespread problem.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5691710/

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fspor.2022.8682...

That's the joke, they are non-WADA compliant on purpose - American NFL and other sports leagues are rotten with steroid abuse and more. And the reason the teams run their own "anti-doping" is so they can know about it before, not because they are beacons of purity.

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