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Is food the ultimate performance enhancer? More and more, athletes, nutrition experts and fitness buffs are saying yes!

By Amy Paturel, for EatingWell, July 2008

Track and field Olympian Marion Jones was America’s darling during the 2000 Olympic games in Sydney, bringing home three gold medals and two bronzes. She ran like a lean, high-powered machine, and credited nutrition supplements—including flaxseed oil and iron—for her superstar performances. Later, she admitted to taking steroids. Since then, accusations of using performance-enhancing drugs have become frequent among elite athletes such as baseball pitcher Roger Clemens (who still denies using steroids and human growth hormone) and American cyclist Floyd Landis (who was stripped of his title as the 2006 Tour de France winner after blood tests suggested he took synthetic testosterone). As a result, most sports nutritionists won’t recommend supplements—or even multivitamins in some cases. They’re afraid that a tainted pill could cause an athlete to fail a drug test.

“The risk of product contamination can be as high as one in five or one in six,” says Martin Gibala, Ph.D., associate professor in the department of kinesiology at McMaster University in Canada. Besides, “athletes need to eat real foods to enhance performance—not supplements,” says Gibala. In fact, experts say, getting the right mix of carbohydrate, protein and fat can mean the difference between an Olympic gold medal in Beijing and going home empty-handed.

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