Is it possible for an athlete to test positive from contaminated supplements?

There is a very large part of the population out there that mistakenly but sincerely believe that athletes are getting tested positive for drugs due to possible contamination problems with certain supplements. This article aims to put the record straight and give you some previously unwritten facts.

Supplements are manufactured by two distinct gorups. One is what we term the professionals and the other is the home-based operations. We can only speak for the professionals, of which we are one. The job of a professional supplements manufacturer is to manufacture nutritional supplements for human consumption to the highest possible quality using their available resources. As for LA Muscle, these resources are vast and encompass scientists, FDA-approved labs and the purest ingredients. At LA Muscle our plant is regulated and inspected often. Batches of various products are manufactured in the most hygenic and organised manner possible. A different set of machinery is used for different products.

Home-based operators on the other hand, typically have one machine and use that for the manufacture of almost their entire range. Each of these machines usually cost in excess of $1,000,000, so who can blame them for not being able to afford any more!

Is it possible for a product to get contaminated by another? We are not sure. It is probably possible, but as we have never ran such an operation, we could not tell you for sure. What we can 100% guarantee you is that there is absolutely NO possibilty of ANY LA Muscle product contaminating another. This is not possible because of the way we manufacture products in seperate runs, at different times, using different machinery.

We propose another explanation...

Most of you will surely remember the fiasco a while back of athelets testing positive for various performance-enhancers or their pre-cursors/derivatives. We say a while back, but this is actually happening now too. Between these athletes and their coaches, they had/have to come up with some kind of logical explanation and the most believable one was probably to say that the products they used must have been contaminated.

The truth is that any 19-Nor product would test an athlete positive for Nandrolone, even months after use. Many of these athletes were taking 19-Nor as it was widely available everywhere. So it was no great mystery that so many of them were testing positive.

The sad thing was that many of them carried on with this nonesense story about the products being contaminated. Once again, this is very unlikely. Why? Because it just doesn't happen with professional manufacturers and those smaller home-based operators don't usually have the capabilities to manufacture stronger supplements which may jump into other product tubs!

If an athlete takes the wrong product, they could get tested positive for a banned substance, even 1 year later. As simple as that. Athletes should try and get educated on supplements and make the right choices. If they get caught, hold their hands up and own up! Let's not start talking about supplements contamination as a scapegoat. Anyone that is in the manufacturing business for supplements will tell you that this is very unlikely and even if it does happen with some of the smaller operators, it is very unlikely for any quantity to be high enough for a positive test.

Choose a reputable manufacturer that you really trust first. This is vital. At LA Muscle we have some supplements that can test a natural athlete positive. However, these are clearly pointed out as such and competing athletes should stay away from these. We believe a strong reason for sticking to LA Muscle is the huge number of natural athletes that we sponsor - and who DO NOT TEST POSITIVE.

None of these athletes have ever tested positive for any banned substance through a mistake or the so called phantom contaminations that seem to be going on!

Invariably, this is a complex area. For example Zinc, which is a perfectly fine IOC allowable substance can substantially increase male hormone levels. We recommend Zinc to competing athletes but urge caution before competitions or testing.

As a final note, LA Muscle can categorically state that there is zero chance of any cross-over of ingredients in our products. Without wanting to plug our competitors, we would hazard a guess that this is probably the case with the majority of them too. The next time you hear a professional athlete test positive for something, it's either that they had not done their homework and taken the wrong product or that they thought they can get away with it; as simple as that.