Baseball players group expands supplements blacklist
Products named and shamed by the MLBPA include Bromodrol, Gaspari Novedex XT and Purus Labs Nasty Mass.
"We continue to work with the Association in identifying what should be on the banned list," said Pat Courtney, Major League Baseball’s vice president of operations, on the MLB website. "We jointly make sure players are aware.”
The MLBPA was not taking calls this morning and NutraIngredients-USA.com was unable to attain which supplements had been added to the list and why.
But no adverse event reports have been highlighted.
The list goes to MLBPA members and the 30 Major League baseball teams.
Dan Fabricant, PhD, the vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs at the Washington DC-based Natural Products Association questioned the effectiveness of such a list, as well as the motivation for its establishment.
“It still is a form of finger pointing and a distraction from the real issue which is their own drug testing policies, which are far below the standards of the Olympics and below other sports like horse racing,” he told NutraIngredients-USA.com.
He said the MLB and the MLBPA had the money to set up better testing programs which would better screen for dangerous products.
“Certainly have the financial resources to set up a program where if an athlete wants to take a product, any product, not just a select few as in their certification program, they can have it tested or screened for banned substance, so why hasn’t that happened?”
“Perhaps the reason is that such a program may serve to back up what we have been saying all along which is that supplement makers would never put illegal or banned substances in products that are easily purchased in health food stores, and that the athletes were really using performance enhancing drugs and that’s why an athlete failed a drug test, not because of a supplement.”
