How healthy are the strength supplements that we are using today?
We’ve all heard of steroids, prohormones, and protein powders. And we know that the supplement industry is a billion dollar industry, often feeding on the weaknesses of people hoping to make dramatic changes to their physiques in a short period of time. But how do we know which muscle building supplements are the most popular, and how they affect the health of their users?
We could look at some retail websites and see the top-selling supplements on their home pages, or, alternatively, we can examine what people are searching for on the Internet. (It is reasonable to assume that the most searched supplements are also going to be purchased relatively more frequently.) This article will look at the latter option. Since we don’t have solid statistics, one reasonable way to estimate search traffic is to take one website which has supplement reviews as the major component of its content, and analyse the web server logs.
What we found was rather troublesome in some respects. The number one supplement in terms of Internet searches leading to this website, by a factor of greater than...