Ethnopharmacology and male bodybuilders' lived experience with consuming sports nutrition supplements in Canada

Abstract

In recent years, the availability of sports nutrition supplements has expanded from niche to mainstream and online environments in a largely unregulated marketplace in Canada. For bodybuilders, consuming these products is a normative practice. In spite of the proliferation of supplements and diversity in which masculine ideal types are constructed, the experiences of male bodybuilders who use supplements have drawn little academic attention. This article examines the impact that lived experience has for 32 male bodybuilders in interpreting physical cues and assessing risks associated with these ergogenic aids sold legally in Canada. Examined through a phenomenological lens, male bodybuilders in this study developed an ethnopharmacological understanding of supplement consumption. They privileged not only their first-hand experiences with supplement consumption, but also those of other trusted bodybuilders over other sources of information including warnings issued by government about the ‘dangers’ of consuming certain products.

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank James Gillett, Michael Atkinson and the anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

¹Ploderers, Howard and Thomas, ‘Collaboration on Social Network Sites’.

²Monaghan, ‘Creating the Perfect Body’, 269–70.

³Atkinson, ‘Playing with Fire’, 167.

⁴ Health Canada, ‘Natural Health Products’, October 20, 2011, http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/dhp-mps/prodnatur/index-eng.php (accessed April 13, 2012). Of note, supplements containing prohormones such as androstenedione – like most other sports nutrition supplements geared towards bodybuilders – do not fall within the scope of the Natural Health Product Regulations in Canada. Health Canada has issued advisories and warnings about products not authorized for sale in Canada. Of particular interest to this study would be warnings issued to the public in April 2006 and June 2008 about products containing illegal steroids and prohormones; see the Health Canada ‘Advisories and Warnings’ for more information; For an overview of the regulation of dietary supplements in the USA, see Kreider et al., ‘ISSN Exercise’.

⁵ Canadian Food Inspection Agency, ‘Sports Nutrition Products’, http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/fssa/labeti/inform/sporte.shtml (accessed July 9, 2010).

⁶ Health Canada, ‘Advisories and Warnings’, March 16, 2011, http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ahc-asc/media/advisories-avis/index-eng.php (accessed June 3, 2011).

⁷Mason, Scammon and Fang, ‘Impact of Warnings’, 75.

⁸ Health Canada, ‘Advisories, Warnings and Recalls – 2003’, January 10, 2011, http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ahc-asc/media/advisories-avis/2003-eng.php#june (accessed June 20, 2011).

⁹ A suspect health product search of the Canadian Vigilance Adverse Reaction Online Database, http://webprod3.hc-sc.gc.ca/arquery-rechercheei/index-eng.jsp (accessed April 13, 2012), for products with the active ingredient beginning with ‘ephedra’ or ‘ephedrine’ between 1 January 1965 and 9 June 2003 by initial received date returned 184 adverse reaction reports filed by consumers to Health Canada's Marketed Health Products Directorate. Pseudoephedrine, a common ingredient in cold remedies, and all other combinations of ingredient names containing ‘ephedra’ or ‘ephedrine’ were excluded. When searching for products with the active ingredient ‘ma huang’ – the Chinese herbal synonym for ephedra – over the same time frame, 53 reports were returned. It has not been determined if these two searches yield mutually exclusive adverse reaction reports.

¹⁰ Health Canada, ‘Health Canada Reminds Canadians Not to Use Ephedra/Ephedrine Products’, March 11, 2008, http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ahc-asc/media/advisories-avis/_2008/2008_41-eng.php (accessed April 13, 2012).

¹¹ I reviewed the Supplements Canada website, http://www.supplementscanada.com (accessed March 3, 2012), and counted the number of unique sports nutrition supplement categories and companies.

¹²Moston, Skinner and Engelberg, ‘Perceived Incidence Drug Use’; Thualagant, ‘Conceptualization of Fitness Doping’.

¹³Grogan et al., ‘Experiences of Anabolic Steroid Use’; Klein, ‘Pumping Irony’; Klein, Little Big Men; Klein, ‘Life's Too Short’; Monaghan, ‘Challenging Medicine?’; Monaghan, Bodybuilding, Drugs and Risk; Monaghan, ‘Vocabularies of Motive’; Monaghan, ‘Accounting for Illicit Steroid Use’; Pederson, ‘Doping and the Perfect Body Expert’; Wright, Grogan and Hunter, ‘Motivations for Anabolic Steroid Use’.

¹⁴Breivik, Hanstad and Loland, ‘Attitudes towards Use’.

¹⁵Atkinson, ‘Playing with Fire’.

¹⁶ , ‘Pumping Iron’; ‘Pumping Irony’; ‘Man Makes Himself’; Little Big Men.

¹⁷Klein, ‘Man Makes Himself’, 328.

¹⁸Boyle, ‘Marketing Muscular Masculinity’.

¹⁹Atkinson, ‘Playing with Fire’.

²⁰ , ‘Little Big Man’; Little Big Men; ‘Life's Too Short’.

²¹Gillett and White, ‘Male Bodybuilding and the Reassertion’; White and Gillett, ‘Reading the Muscular Body’.

²²Gillett and White, ‘Male Bodybuilding and the Reassertion’; Klein, ‘Man Makes Himself’; , ‘Creating the Perfect Body’; Bodybuilding, Drugs and Risk.

²³Monaghan, ‘Creating the Perfect Body’; Shilling, Body and Social Theory.

²⁴Bailey and Gillett, ‘Bodybuilding and Health Work’; Locks, ‘Flayed Animals in an Abattoir’; Monaghan, ‘Creating the Perfect Body’.

²⁵Bailey and Gillett, ‘Bodybuilding and Health Work’; Bridges, ‘Gender Capital and Male Bodybuilders’; Probert, Leberman and Palmer, ‘New Zealand Bodybuilder Identities’.

²⁶Crawford, ‘Cultural Account of Health’.

²⁷Bailey and Gillett, ‘Bodybuilding and Health Work’; Keane, ‘Diagnosing the Male Steroid User’; Monaghan, ‘Looking Good’; Monaghan, ‘Accounting for Illicit Steroid Use’.

²⁸Bailey and Gillett, ‘Bodybuilding and Health Work’.

²⁹Pederson, ‘Doping and the Perfect Body Expert’; also see Monaghan, ‘Creating the Perfect Body’, 276, for a typology of muscular bodies.

³⁰ While out of scope for the current project, it should be noted that female bodybuilding has also been the focus of study over the last two decades. Suggested readings include: Boyle, ‘Flexing the Tensions’; Roussel et al., ‘Metamorphosis of Female Bodybuilders’; Guthrie and Castelnuovo, ‘Elite Women Bodybuilders’; Shilling and Bunsell, ‘Female Bodybuilder as a Gender Outlaw’; St. Martin and Gavey, ‘Women's Bodybuilding’; Saltman, ‘Men with Breasts’; Bunsell and Shilling, ‘Outside and Inside’.

³¹White and Gillett, ‘Reading the Muscular Body’.

³²Loseke, Thinking, 26.

³³Spector and Kitsuse, Constructing Social Problems.

³⁴Best, Social Problems, 131.

³⁵Foucault, Power/Knowledge.

³⁶White and Gillett, ‘Reading the Muscular Body’, 18.

³⁷Loseke, Thinking, 26.

³⁸Ibarra and Kitsuse, ‘Claims-Making Discourse’.

³⁹ Statistics Canada, ‘2006 Community Profiles’, March 13, 2007, http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/prof/92-591/index.cfm?Lang = E (accessed June 20, 2011).

⁴⁰Berg, Qualitative Research Methods.

⁴¹Adler and Adler, Membership Roles in Field Research, 67.

⁴²Hathaway and Atkinson, ‘Self-Presentation and Social Poetics’, 71.

⁴³Glaser and Strauss, Discovery of Grounded Theory, 46.

⁴⁴Morse and Richards, Readme First.

⁴⁵Seale, ‘Computer-Assisted Analysis’.

⁴⁶Morse and Richards, Readme First, 141.

⁴⁷Richards, Handling Qualitative Data, 80.

⁴⁸Bloor, Sociology of HIV Transmission; Calnan, Health & Illness; Crawford, ‘Cultural Account of Health’; Low, ‘Managing Safety and Risk’; Pawluch, Cain and Gillett, ‘Lay Construction of HIV’; Popay and Williams, ‘Public Health Research’.

⁴⁹Robertson, ‘Not Living Life’, 176.

⁵⁰Gillett, Cain and Pawluch, ‘Moving Beyond the Biomedical’, 372.

⁵¹ Monaghan, ‘Accounting for Illicit Steroid Use’; Monaghan, ‘Vocabularies of Motive’, 698.

⁵²Schutz and Luckmann, Structures of the Life-World.

⁵³Crossley, ‘Merleau-Ponty’, 54.

⁵⁴Monaghan, Bodybuilding, Drugs and Risk, 106; Monaghan, ‘Vocabularies of Motive’, 703.

⁵⁵Buford et al., ‘International Society of Sports Nutrition’; Cooper et al., ‘Creatine Supplementation with Specific View’. A loading period with creatine supplementation is characterized by the ingestion of a higher amount of creatine in typically the first three to five days of a creatine cycling protocol followed by a lower ‘maintenance’ dosage in the days that follow. The purpose of a ‘loading protocol’ is to saturate the muscle stores of creatine and enhance the ergogenic effect of the supplement.

⁵⁶ For example, ephedrine is currently sold legally in Canada as an oral nasal decongestant, which is often recommended not to be taken for more than seven days unless otherwise advised by a health care practitioner.

⁵⁷Crossley, ‘Merleau-Ponty’, 57.

⁵⁸Crossley, ‘The Networked Body’, cited in Waskul and Vannini, Body/Embodiment, 26.

⁵⁹Monaghan, ‘Creating the Perfect Body’, 268.

⁶⁰Bailey and Gillett, ‘Bodybuilding and Health Work’; Bridges, ‘Gender Capital and Male Bodybuilders’; Probert, Leberman and Palmer, ‘New Zealand Bodybuilder Identities’.

⁶¹Gillett and White, ‘Male Bodybuilding and the Reassertion’, 363.

⁶²Goffman, Presentation of Self, 11.

⁶³Beck, Risk Society; Beck, World Risk Society; Giddens, Consequences of Modernity; Giddens, ‘Living in a Post-Traditional Society’.

⁶⁴ Hockey and Allen-Collinson, ‘Grasping the Phenomenology of Sporting Bodies’, 115.

⁶⁵ Health Canada, ‘Health Canada Reminds Canadians Not to Use Ephedra/Ephedrine Products’, March 11, 2008, http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ahc-asc/media/advisories-avis/_2008/2008_41-eng.php (accessed April 13, 2012); Health Canada, ‘Advisories and Warnings’, March 16, 2011, http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ahc-asc/media/advisories-avis/index-eng.php (accessed June 3, 2011).