Radical Performance Maximizer & More

RPM by AN (AppliedNutraceuticals) isn’t the only company to blame for ridiculous supplement names. ALRI might be just as bad with product names such as Bad Ass Mass and WTF Pumped. I feel like it’s almost become a joke, especially when you look even further at the products’ subtitles. What’s RPM’s short ‘lil subtitle that’s supposed to sum-up the product so customers can easily understand it’s function when looking at the bottle? “Phytochemical Selective Androgen Receptor Modulator (P-Sarm).” Haha, that’s great…I’m sure that when people see “Radical Performance Maximizer” and don’t understand it (because that really says nothing), they then just look at the subtitle and are like “Oh yah sweet, I totally get it now.” Riiiiiiiiight. Rather, people think “Damn I don’t know what that means but it sounds super scientific and complex and will be totally sweet to take before my workouts and get freaky jacked.” I think we’re going to come out with our own supplement line that one-ups everyone else by having product names such as “Freaky Deaky Methyl-Drol Stimulating Androgenic Benzene Modifiying Pump Matrix” and “Super-1,2,4,5,6-Drol-ythene-Methyl-dopa-deca-massive-testosterone Stabilzer Monster Mass Maker”. Yah, that would be totally sweet. On the ingredient panel I would just list “Stuff that makes you massive…just look at the title loser…this stuff will clearly make you freaky JACKED!” Yeahhhhhhhh. Definitely.

Anyway, we all know these names are silly. But whatever, I really don’t care about them. They keep me amused during my day-to-day BS activities so I actually appreciate ‘em. However, I do think we as an industry need to provide consumers with a bit more clarification on products and their functionalities, especially those companies that “manufacture” the supplements (”private label” is more accurate, since most manufacturers do little more than slap a label on an exisiting product). People who actually know what they’re talking about need to reach-out and help people understand what kind of stuff they’re putting in their bodies. As a biomedical engineer that took more science and engineering classes than I’d want to in 6 lifetimes, I’ll do my best to describe exactly what the AN RPM (Radical Performance Maximizer) is all about.

Hahaha. Wait, before I start I must make fun of AN again. At the bottom of RPMs label, it says “Strength, Hardness, Intense Energy, Drive and Focus, Pump, Boosts Testosterone, Incinerates Fat, Builds Muscle.” That is terrific. What the hell does it not do? Will it find me a girlfriend, buy me a house and cook me dinner too? That’s ridiculous…regardless of how good this product is (a lot of people are saying it’s great, I have no idea because I don’t give my opinion on a product until I try it), that mix of words and benefits should scare people off. A product that promises too much usually drastically under-delivers. Yet, again, I actually think this product is good, the company AN is simply taking advantage of many consumers’ stupidity or fantastic sense of humor.

Ok, so let’s breakdown the ACTIVE ingredients in this product: Icarrin, L-Arginine, Grape Seed Extract, Naringin, Chocamine, and my favorite, Methyl Xanthine Anhydrous Caffeine. No point in listing the inactive ingredients such as Gelatin and Cellulose because they serve no purpose ever except for binding purposes (assuming you don’t have religious, allergy restrictions).

Icarrin
Heard of Horny Goat Weed? Icarrin is basically the same thing. Horny Goat Weed’s scientific name is Epimedium Gradiflorum, and the strength of Epimedium is judged by the amount of Icarrin (the active glycosidic compound in Epimedium) that is present. When Icarrin is listed on a product, it’s not pure Icarrin. Rather, it is usually Epimedium standardized to 10-60% Icarrin, as anything higher than that is typically reserved for lab use. In RPM’s case, you’re getting a standardized extract of 50%, which is pretty good.

Alright all this talk of Horny Goat Weed is getting me excited. Please check back tomorrow and we’ll pick-up where I’m leaving off. Gotta’ “run” off now.

Anti-Impressing

Are you depressed? If so, you may be among the 99% of Americans who say they are depressed at some point in time nearly every week.

I’ve been depressed at times. We all have. But when I hear that 10-15% of the American population is taking anti-depressants, I’m scared for the future. (Richard Rubin, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine)

This was before a college senior gunned down 32 of his classmates at Virginia Tech yesterday. I won’t write about this because I’m not a good enough writer to express my feelings. No-one is. But I’ll go out on a limb and say that anti-depressants may come up for discussion whether this kid was on them or not.

I’ve never used an anti-depressant. And I feel for those people who are clinically diagnosed as being in a state of mind that would drastically benefit from these drugs. But I believe there is a large and growing class of anti-depressant users who are playing the role of medicinal self-healer.

I think the number is probably closer to 15%. One example that I’ll cite (and I won’t spare my own embarrassment) – I locked myself out of my apartment a few weeks ago. The girl next door was nice enough to let me use her cell phone and invited me in to her place to watch her TIVO-shows while I was waiting for the locksmith to come. When I finally found my way back into my apartment, I joked that I would send a gift down as a token of my appreciation – I’d noticed lots of wine on the counter, so I told her she’d have a bottle by the next evening. She said that she would prefer Prozac. I laughed.

“No, really. I know you’re like…in the health industry and you sell all this stuff. Could you get it? I’m going through some seriously bad times right now. I hope you don’t think I’m weird. I know you can get it though”

No, I can’t. Not legally.

And I think she’s weird.

And this is precisely the problem. Anti-depressants were never meant to be used by people who think they’re depressed. They’re meant to make clinical treatment by a psychologist more effective. The first step toward treating depression is making an appointment with someone who can properly prescribe these drugs if there is a need for them. They’re the only people qualified to make these decisions. Many of the commonly prescribed drugs like Zoloft, Prozac, Celexa and Paxil have serious contra-indications and one needs to take into consideration other medications and drug interactions. Anna Nicole Smith’s death was a direct result.

The fundamental problem is that there is no longer a stigma attached to these drugs and anti-depressants, along with a whole slew of other drugs, are now accepted. That girl didn’t think it was weird to ask her neighbor if he could get Prozac for God’s sake! In Los Angeles, knowing your anti-depressants is even trendy some places. But then again, almost anything can be trendy if you find the right group of people to make it that way.

Ladies and Gents, we need to start taking responsibility for what we put in our bodies. This extends beyond prescriptions drugs like anti-depressants to supplements as well. Our culture has gotten way to nonchalant about what we’re putting into our systems, and it’s going to grow into a problem of epidemic proportions if we don’t make some solid attempts to change consumer behavior right now. That will be difficult, though, as this trend in consumer behavior – this acceptance of more serious drugs and supplements – is making a lot of people extremely wealthy and making people feel like they’re helping themselves. Tough to argue with, right? Even tougher to argue if you’re trying to convince someone who doesn’t have anything (or anyone) else to turn to!I propose an alternative to anti-depressants: find a good friend. In a culture where we treat depression with MySpace blogs, emails and IM’s, a good heart to heart over a giant bowl of ice cream with a latte to wash it down with should go a long way.

Pure Genius Diet Plan

In light of all of the success currently being experienced by Diet & Meal Plan companies such as Nutrisystem, the Zone Diet, Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig, I am simply too impatient to sit on the sidelines. Here I am helping run an online nutrition store with an integrated healthy vending machine network when I could be thinking-up brilliant ways to package small meals of food, deliver it to people’s homes, and charge them the price of a much larger, higher quality meal. So I’ve been thinking for quite some time about how my plan could differ from all of the others, and I think I’ve finally arrived at a solution. Yet before I delve into my plan, let’s take a quick glance at the others plans that exist in the market today.

NutriSystem
This company takes ordinary foods, packages them in very small portions, and sells them to you at high costs. And how amazing it is - by eating 1/2 the food you usually do, you lose weight. Wow, who would have thought.

Zone Diet
See NutriSystem, but with a focus on 40% carbohydrate, 30% protein and 30% fat meal balance….which is what basically any sensible meal turns out to be by default. Again, you pay more to eat less….yet another great business model for them.

Weight Watchers
This program has a completely brilliant system which rates foods on a point scale based on the amount of calories the foods contain. This program benefits from the fact that people like to look at numbers from 1 to 5 rather than glance at nutritional labels. “150 Calories”, “250mg of Sodium”….these numbers look so scary! Weight Watchers is little more than a rudimentary calculator that divides Caloric amounts by a certain factor to arrive at small numbers which are so very nice to deal with.

Jenny Craig
Focuses on small portions, which doesn’t seem that innovative considering the above, yet no worries, they have a catchy theme song.

All of these companies create elaborate marketing schemes and advertising campaigns when they’re really no more than food service companies who charge their customers lots of money for little amounts of food. However, these companies will always succeed, even if their customers know exactly how ridiculous their programs really are. Why? Because as humans we lack self-discipline and for some reason need other people and other things to direct us. We’re not able to cook a whole chicken and only eat a quarter of it. We can’t bake a batch of brownies and only have just one. Do you think that the cookies NutriSystem gives you are really better-for-you than those that are in your cupboard? Ha! No, it’s just that the NutriSystem cookies only come in single-serving sizes so you can’t mow ‘em down until you’re sick to your stomach and want to die.

We all need things to keep us on track and allow us to stay motivated toward our health, diet or general health goals. Thus, I don’t think these plans are terrible. However, I do think they’re silly. The foods they provide are low quality (how good can the food really be when you’re shipping it to 500,000 households?) and they’re not even that healthy. People could enjoy better foods for less money and would end-up in a better spot overall. With all of the nutritional hoopla that exists out there today, the most basic principle of nutrition still applies: Calories In minus Calories Out is the main thing that really matters. If you have to focus on anything, focus on perfecting that simple equation and you will reach your goals, regardless if your goal is to lose weight, gain muscle, etc. We tend to complicate things to such a great degree that we focus on the little details, neglect the most important/obvious components, and thus get frustrated and resort to paying Jenny Craig so much money that she sells out to a big conglomerate for millions upon millions of dollars.

Considering all of the above, I will now present my plan.

Forget the food, I’m simply going to send people various Tupperware containers. One will be labeled “Entree” one will be labeled “Side Dish” and one will be labeled “Dessert”. My diet will simply be that for each meal you can eat as much entree, side dish or dessert as you want as long as you can fit it all into my containers (which will obviously be really sparkly and have pictures of beautiful people on them). Clearly the containers will be very, very small so that even the most sweet-toothed, butter-hungry person would constantly be in a Calorie-deficient state and would thus lose weight. With this plan, I’d pay nothing for food but would charge just as much as everybody else. My customers wouldn’t have to worry about lack of self-discipline (that is eating meal #2 along with meal #1) because there wouldn’t be any food to eat. Lastly, my shipping/logistics system would be incredible - no spoliage, no damages…only durable Tupperware.

I know it is difficult to comprehend the genius that came up with this idea so don’t try too hard. Instead, please sign-up for my program my sending me an email with all of your payment information to starvationdiet@sillysillyyou.com. You’ll be thanking me soon when the pounds are just melting away!

Ahh, excuse me, but I have to exit now…I need to go and scope which Lambo I’ll want to buy once NutriSystem is begging me for a little M&A.

Silly Supplements: Change is in the Future

I remember the days when I knew everything about every single ingredient, magazine advertisement, and forum post of what seemed like every nutritional supplement out there, and I loved it. This is when I still believed what supplement companies said about their products and was ignorant enough to think that every one of these companies really wanted to create products that truly benefited the people who consumed them. Ha! Now that I’m neck-deep in the industry, and have a college degree in biomedical engineering, I see the true inner-workings of the funny world of supplements. The supplement industry is primarily a race to see who can do the best job of marketing the exact same product, from the exact same contract manufacturer, to a general public who often knows little about the scientific evidence (or lack thereof) of the nutritional products they purchase.

Clearly, not all supplement companies are marketing machines with no regard for the true health of their customers. But even the companies with a respectable mission and quality R&D division get sucked into the silly supplement wars. And you know what, it’s really not their fault. How can a company who is focused purely on lab results, clinical trials and quality control, but with little advertising, compete with a company that places its logo in every corner of the nutritional universe? Right now, they can’t compete…no way. There is a reason why Muscle Tech, BSN & Optimum Nutrition are a few of the supplement companies with the highest revenues - they do the most marketing and advertising! Am I saying that these companies are purely marketing machines? No - they produce some good supplements (primarily BSN, not MT). But the public doesn’t even know what these “good” supplements are….everything is blended together.

Now one might say “who cares, all industries are like this”. Well yes, that’s true. But last time I checked no one was trying to eat a Toyota or drink Exxon Mobile. It’s different when people put products in their bodies - there is a different standard that nutritional companies should be forced to uphold. So can the industry change?

The supplement industry is so far gone that no one company can save it. Rather, the only thing that can save the supplement industry, or actually revolutionize it, is a mass consumer movement. Consumers need to stand-up for their nutritional needs and refuse to pay 50% of their supplement cost to fund “nutritional” companies marketing budgets. We need to start demanding knowledge of exactly what is in our products and need to form better user networks of people who know what they’re talking about and can undercover the good and expose the bad. We need to start thinking about nutritional products more for us and less for them (the supplement companies themselves). The online forums are a very good start, but we certainly have a ways to go.

Our customers request products, and because of it, we will provide these products to them. In the end, we are here to serve our customers, and that will always be our stance. But that doesn’t mean that I think Muscle Tech Gakic or Leukic is a good product! I’ll still tell you that I think they’re terrible and worthless supplements if you ask me. So what do I want you to do? Just promise me that before you get excited after reading that 20 page supplement-company-sponsored ground-breaking news report in the next issue of Flex/Muscle & Fitness, you’ll ask yourself why this company is spending 50% of their revenue on advertising instead of in the lab, in the gym and in proper trials where they should be. Stand-up and fight for your supplement rights. Demand better products and consult with people you can trust. Sooner or later, a finer nutritional industry, or revolutionary company will appear.

Legal Steroids - Society Wins

This is just a modest proposal that came to mind after reading an influx of user requests for pro-testosterone supplements over the past week.

If there was a stock market boom in the late 90’s, there sure as heck was a supplement boom. And in the supplement industry, the good times are rolling again. We’re all partying like its 1999 – you consumers have more hardcore stuff to choose from than ever before. Ain’t it cool?

There has been much debate surrounding the legality of testosterone aids, human growth hormone (HGH) boosters and other unregulated dietary supplements that are out of reach, or should I say “out of sight / out of mind” for the Food & Drug Administration. They’ve got Barry Bonds, Floyd Landis and Vioxx to worry about. The 5 guys who sit in a room all day and are supposed to be reviewing applications for unsafe dietary supplements were recently caught passing around a Playboy magazine and playing checkers with beer caps.

There is another debate surrounding the use of performance enhancing drugs by professional baseball players and other paid athletes. There have been numerous proposed solutions, including random drug testing and harsher penalties for athletes, and major fines and market removal for dietary supplements for which instances of adverse effects or physical harm have been filed with the FDA.

Clearly, these are serious issues that need to be met with serious solutions. Until now, little has been done that will have a meaningful impact on peoples’ health, the market for supplements, economic strength or, perhaps most importantly, national security.

I shall humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I’ve been assured by a very knowledgeable medical professional that the quickest way to a healthier, stronger population is the legalization of anabolic steroids. He was specific in stating that government administered Oxandrolone (Anavar) to every post-adolescent male would raise economic productivity and lower healthcare costs (excluding treatment of heart-related problems) more than enough to compensate for developed addictions and degradation of the nervous and reproductive systems.

Isn’t it a melancholy object to those who walk along the California coastline to see the boardwalk crowded with individuals who lack muscular development? Of course it is. That was a rhetorical question. These young men, instead of being able to employ their time furthering their professional careers, are forced to spend countless hours in the weight room and the kitchen.

Now, you have to understand - I’ve turned my thoughts for many years upon this important subject, and maturely weighed the several schemes of other people. I have always found them grossly mistaken in their computation of the undesirable side effects of these anabolic and androgenic compounds, which are really nothing more than natural hormones. Given in proper dosages, they have only desirable effects. The side effects of many dietary supplements are far worse.

Maybe this will help put things into perspective:

The number of people in this country is approximately 300 million; around 80 million have memberships or access to some kind of health club or facility. Of those 80 million, around 40 million are trying to increase their muscle mass. Of those 40 million, I estimate that 10 million are serious enough to try dietary supplements such as Methyl-1D, 17-HD, RPN Havoc or or a plethora of products by Advanced Muscle Sciences, products which will not give them the same results as anabolic steroids and may offer greater consequences due to the fact that they have to be ingested (thus, they pass through the liver). By my calculation, if we could simply give these 10 million people cheap, easy access to anabolic steroids, then they would not only be healthier and happier but would be able to devote the time that they did not require themselves to spend in the gym to doing other, more productive things that benefit society. In my estimation, we would add over $100 million to our Gross National Products every quarter because of these individuals.

In the case of war, or the issue of national security, these 10 million men would be able to fend off an army of up to a billion (should China ever attack) due to their aggression, muscular development, stamina and strength. If the Spartans could do it with no anabolic substances, surely we can do it with Anavar. We would also be able to reduce our national expenditure on sophisticated weapons, as these individuals would be able to take advantage of hand to hand combat in this “new kind of war” that we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan which often involves confrontations in the street.

By employing these men in laborious jobs such as steel or construction, we may be able to keep pace with housing demand and compete with China on the basis of low-skilled, but in our case highly strong, labor.

Furthermore, some of these men may, as a result of their physical growth, be able to acquire jobs in professional football, baseball, basketball or some other physically demanding sport. They would make millions of dollars and live the American dream and none of this would be possible had they chosen to continue spending money on legal dietary supplements that require intense training sessions and strict adherence to a diet. Who has time for that…

It simply makes too much sense. I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary movement; I have no other motive other than the public good and the love of my country and fellow fitness enthusiast.

If anyone objects to these arguments in any way or is not in full agreement with my modest proposal, please send an email to offended@fitfuel.com and your inquiry will be routed to the first available counselor.

I’ve left you guys a video that fully supports my claims - in it, you’ll see a steroid user who embodies the ‘fightin the good fight’. Enjoy.

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