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Q: What's up with Sportspharma's new Actisyn? The ad says that it increases test, GH, insulin, and IGF-1 within four hours of ingestion. And they have a university study to back it up. Also, GNC has a new product called Profile, which is a protein substrate and despite only having like 8 grams of protein, is supposed to be as good as 80 grams. I thought I knew my nutrition and supplementation, but I feel like a 14-year-old virgin asking Traci Lords for sex tips. Help me out here.
A: SportPharma's Actisyn "study." Let's take a look. We called the company and got a copy of the study sent to us. We received a poor quality photocopy of a fax. The first page of the copy is dated "November 26, 1998 at 11:05am, page two" and says Elite Fitness USA. Now the question we have to ask is, of all the published studies done, have any ever listed a fax number on the top or bottom margins? None to our knowledge. It comes across as sloppy, and if you can't type up a neat looking report, then how do you convince people that you have good research skills? The next question is, why the hell is the name "Elite Fitness" on this? Without going any further you can already smell shit. Now on page two of our copy things get interesting. It's dated "December 15, 1998 at 1:45pm" and says Biotem, along with a fax number (1-818-340-8924) and the notation "page two."
So follow this, we supposedly have a legitimate study and yet the first two pages are faxes from different companies. On page three of our copy, the fax info is the same as on page two. Pages 4-13 of our copy all say Elite Fitness again with the same date, yet varying page numbers. We checked the Biotem number and it was a legitimate fax number, although we couldn't verify for whom. So far we have a supposed study with no journal title that looks like a stapling together of various faxes. I don't know about you guys, but this doesn't fit my description of "research". So, at best, all it could be is a report from one company to another. If this is true, then it is not a peer reviewed publication, so we have no way of authenticating the quality of the work.
Now let's check out the authors listed on the paper: Charles B. Hensley, R. Steven Davidson, and Stephen N. Mayer. All are part of the Human Performance Institute, A Division of Biotem Cytotechnologies. We did a web search using several search engines. Each time, the only links that came up brought us to a copy of the Actisyn study or to SportPharma's website. So next we did a check on Medline's list of Institutions. We could not come up with anything for either Biotem or Biotem Cytotechnologies. So then we did Medline searches of the authors. We found a C.B. Hensley with 14 citations, R.S. Davidson with 60 citations, and S. Mayer with 238 citations. We could not confirm that these are the same people on the mythological Actisyn study. Some other things seemed questionable. First, none of the authors appears to have previous experience performing supplement studies in humans. Quality research has to have the input from an experienced researcher, otherwise who makes sure everything's done right? So if you're a legitimate company and want quality work done, do you go to people with no experience or do you go to people with experience?
Secondly, none of the author's on the paper list their institutions. If these were the same people we found on Medline, it would be to their advantage to list their school for purposes of obtaining or maintaining tenure. As we read through the paper, we found numerous mistakes in grammar, punctuation, and spelling. The introduction does not explain to the reader the necessary background information, like, for instance, why they would think Actisyn is more anabolic than whey protein. We also noted that there's no mention of prior approval for testing on the rats by an Animal Use Committee or for the human subjects by a Human Use Committee. Every study is required to get this done and they always include this information. There are also no units for any of the hormones that were measured. All the hormonal data is given in percentages. The bottom line is that this is total bullshit. So if anyone from SportPharma reads this and has a pair of balls, please contact the Gang as we would like to ask you some more questions about the study. At this time we would have to say stay away from all SportPharma products. Any company that does this kind of shit should be boycotted. Sorry for the long reply but this was the shortened version. There were numerous other flaws we didn't mention.
As far as the GNC product, we don't have anything specific on it at this time. However, there's no way that 8 grams is better than 80 grams of protein, if they're both high quality animal-based proteins (i.e. whey, casein). So they're probably comparing apples to oranges.
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