The Bodybuilding Industrial Complex:

There's been a transforemation in recent years of the the bodybuilding community. It has come from being amatureish, to a very professional industry. This transformation has occurd with the help of science and it's abilty to back up results with solid evidence. Magazines have allso helped the industry grow and mature. But the matureity has been doubled edged. From being a poor and amature only industry into something that people can get rich and make money off of. Much of the funding for the research that goes into bodybuilding comes from buisness looking to profit off the consumers desire to lose weight and put on muscle, and perhaps look like the next Mr. Olympia. My issue here is'nt with the people who want to loose weight and improve the quality of their lives. My issue here is with those corperations looking to prey upon the population and provide the seemingly endless array of supplent products.

The arguments to made for and against the supplment industry are:

#1 Supplement companies are only selling what the consumer wants.

#2 Supplement comapanies ought to be at the mercy of the free market.

#3 The supplement industry is lightly regulated and not all claims are to be believed.

I'm all for the freemarket, and letting the freemarket decide the fate of the supplements. I'm allso for the government to decide what gets regulated, and how. But what gets me is that bodybuilding has become industrialized. By that I mean we see and hear how only weightlifting should be done in the gym. We lift and workout in vast halls surrounded by vast stacks of machinery and equipment. We live in towering buildings of steel and concrete. We are cooled by vast cooling systems, and kept warm the same way. We have moved from beings that live, and thrive in an outdoor enviroment, to and indoor one that can controlled to the very tiniest detail.

I believe that when people begining a weight loss, and weightlifting program that they need to keep in the issue of quality of life. Life does'nt start in the gym, nor does it end at the gym. People still need to get outdoors and exert themselves in the many facets of life. Supplements should remian exactly that just supplements and not some critical part of ones life. People need to keep in mind that supplements are meant to sopport the body dureing daily activites. People allso need to keep in mind that not everyone can be the next Mr. O, and that not everyone is going to get a contract to market their supplements. People should keep in mind that the real reason why the step into that gym is to improve their quality of life and that they are going to take supplemnts in support of quality change.