Author: Nick Pelios
Spend enough time around gyms, endurance sports or almost any serious training environment and eventually somebody will ask what supplements you take. Not whether you take supplements, but which ones. Protein powder is almost assumed, followed by creatine, magnesium, electrolytes, omega-3, vitamin D, collagen, amino acids, greens powders, pre-workout formulas and whatever happens to be having its moment on social media that month. Watch a few training videos online and the algorithm quickly decides that your kitchen is apparently incapable of providing everything your body needs. Suddenly recovery requires a powder, hydration requires a special drink and a perfectly ordinary vitamin needs to arrive in a black container with the word "performance" printed somewhere on the front.
The strange thing is that most of the nutrients being advertised to us are not new discoveries. Human beings have been consuming them for thousands of years. Protein did not arrive with protein powder. It exists in meat, fish, eggs, dairy, legumes and many other foods. Omega-3 fatty acids existed before fish oil capsules. Magnesium did not begin life inside a supplement bottle. Calcium was present in dairy products long before somebody printed "bone support" on a label. Potassium is sitting inside potatoes, beans, fruit and vegetables without making much noise about it. Iron, zinc, selenium, B vitamins, carbohydrates and amino acids are all part of ordinary food. The supplement industry did not invent these nutrients. In many cases, it found ways to isolate them, concentrate them, package them conveniently and sell them back to us.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Supplements can be extremely useful, and pretending otherwise would simply replace one piece of bad nutritional advice with another. Someone who struggles to consume enough protein may find a shake incredibly practical. An athlete with a diagnosed iron deficiency may genuinely require supplementation. Carbohydrate gels make complete sense during long endurance events because carrying a bowl of rice on a bicycle is not particularly convenient. Caffeine can improve performance in certain situations, while creatine monohydrate has accumulated an unusually strong body of research supporting its use for strength, power and repeated high-intensity exercise. The problem is not that supplements exist. The problem is that somewhere along the way they moved from being the final few percent of a good nutritional strategy to being presented as the place where that strategy begins.
Someone starts going to the gym and almost immediately wants to know which protein powder to buy. They feel tired and start researching vitamins. Their muscles hurt after training and suddenly they need a recovery formula. They sweat heavily and assume they need a specialist electrolyte drink. Their sleep is poor, so another supplement appears. Meanwhile, the less glamorous questions often remain unanswered. Are they eating enough? How much protein are they actually consuming? Are there vegetables on the plate most days? When did they last eat fish? Are they eating enough carbohydrates for the amount of training they are doing? Are they drinking enough water? How much alcohol are they consuming? Are they sleeping six hours and expecting a capsule to somehow compensate for it?
These questions are not particularly exciting, but they explain an enormous amount. There is a reason serious sports nutrition organisations continue to promote a food-first approach. The Australian Institute of Sport places everyday food and appropriate sports nutrition at the foundation of athlete nutrition, while supplements are considered selectively when there is a clear reason for using them. The International Olympic Committee takes a similarly measured position. Despite the enormous number of products marketed to athletes, only a relatively small group of supplements have strong evidence for meaningful performance benefits in specific circumstances. The basic message is considerably less exciting than the marketing surrounding sports nutrition: eat properly, train consistently, recover properly and then identify whether something is genuinely missing. There is no discount code attached to that advice, which may partly explain why we hear much less of it.
Your Body Does Not Know What The Packaging Looks Like
Protein is probably the easiest example of how confused the conversation around sports nutrition has become. Protein supplements are useful. They are convenient, relatively inexpensive per serving, easy to transport and simple to measure. For someone with high protein requirements or a busy schedule, a shake can make meeting a daily target considerably easier. But there is nothing biologically magical about protein simply because it arrived as a powder. Once protein is digested, the body is dealing with amino acids. Those amino acids can come from whey, but they can also come from eggs, Greek yogurt, chicken, beef, fish, cottage cheese, lentils, beans and countless other foods. Different sources have different amino acid profiles and levels of digestibility, and athletes following plant-based diets may need to pay greater attention to quantity and variety, but the underlying principle remains remarkably simple. Protein powder is a convenient source of protein, not a different category of nutrition.
The same applies to many of the nutrients that now occupy entire shelves of supplement stores. Oily fish provides omega-3 fatty acids. Nuts, seeds, legumes, whole grains and leafy vegetables provide magnesium. Dairy products and various other foods provide calcium. Meat, seafood and legumes provide iron, although the form of iron and its absorption differ considerably between foods. Eggs provide protein, choline, selenium, vitamins and fats. Fruit and vegetables provide potassium, vitamin C, folate, fibre and a huge range of compounds that rarely receive the same attention as whichever isolated nutrient is fashionable at the time. Whole grains provide carbohydrates, fibre, minerals and B vitamins. None of these foods contains only one useful thing, and that is precisely the point.
Take a sardine. If we describe it using the language of supplements, we could call it a package containing protein, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin B12, selenium, vitamin D and, when the bones are eaten, calcium. An egg could be described as protein, choline, selenium and several vitamins surrounded by fat. Greek yogurt becomes protein, calcium and live cultures. A lentil becomes carbohydrate, protein, fibre, iron and folate. We can break food down this way if we want to understand its nutritional composition, but eventually we have to remember to put it back together again. Humans do not naturally eat individual nutrients. We eat foods containing complex combinations of macronutrients, micronutrients, fibre and thousands of other compounds within a physical structure often described as the food matrix. That structure can influence digestion, absorption, satiety and metabolism in ways that cannot always be reproduced simply by extracting one component and putting it into a capsule.
Creatine provides an excellent example of why a food-first approach should not become an ideological food-only approach. Creatine occurs naturally in our bodies and is present in meat and fish. However, achieving the amounts commonly used in evidence-based supplementation protocols entirely through diet would require eating impractically large quantities of those foods. Creatine monohydrate therefore offers something genuinely useful: a convenient, inexpensive and well-studied way of increasing muscular creatine stores beyond what most people obtain through their normal diet. Caffeine provides another example. Coffee naturally contains it, but a standardized product can allow an athlete to control dosage and timing more precisely. Dietary nitrate occurs naturally in foods such as beetroot and leafy greens, while concentrated products can provide a predictable amount for specific performance situations. These products make sense because they solve a real problem involving dosage, timing or convenience rather than because normal food has somehow become nutritionally inadequate.
There is also one thing that the obsession with individual micronutrients sometimes makes athletes forget: training requires actual food because training requires energy. A cyclist completing hours of endurance work, a runner covering high weekly mileage, a strength athlete trying to build muscle or a freediver training repeatedly throughout the week all need sufficient energy to support that work. The body needs carbohydrates and fats for fuel, protein for tissue repair and adequate overall energy availability to maintain normal physiological function. Someone can take magnesium, creatine, omega-3, vitamin D and a beautifully branded recovery formula every morning, but if they chronically under-eat, sleep badly and train excessively, another supplement is unlikely to address the real problem. Sometimes the body is not asking for another capsule. Sometimes it is simply asking for lunch.
Why Supplements Are So Easy To Sell
The fitness industry has found an almost perfect customer in the athlete because athletes care about small improvements. Tell somebody who does not exercise that a product might improve recovery slightly and they may not care. Tell somebody who has spent six months trying to add ten kilograms to a squat, remove thirty seconds from a cycling climb, run a faster 10K or reach a new depth that something could potentially improve performance by even a small amount and you immediately have their attention. That is not stupidity or gullibility. In many ways it is exactly the mentality that makes people improve at sport. They pay attention to details, tolerate inconvenience and are willing to experiment if they believe something may help them perform better.
The easiest way to sell to that person is not necessarily to promise a miracle. It is often more effective to suggest that something might be missing. Perhaps recovery could be better because magnesium intake is low. Perhaps amino acids are needed around training. Perhaps every sweaty session requires an electrolyte product. Perhaps inflammation is preventing progress, the immune system needs support, hormones need optimising, the gut needs improving or sleep needs another intervention. Once nutrition is presented this way, the athlete can easily develop the feeling that the normal state of the body is one of constant deficiency and that every problem has an ingredient waiting to correct it. There is always another metric to optimise and therefore always another product that might help.
This is where the gap between marketing and evidence becomes important. Sports nutrition research has identified supplements that can improve performance in specific circumstances, but that list is considerably shorter than the shelves of a supplement store suggest. Creatine and caffeine are among the clearest examples, while nitrate and certain buffering agents can also have applications depending on the activity and athlete. Carbohydrate and electrolyte products are valuable in appropriate endurance and environmental conditions. Supplements are also important when correcting genuine nutritional deficiencies. Beyond these clearer examples, evidence becomes much more variable. Some products contain ingredients that have been studied individually but are sold as complex mixtures that have never been tested in that exact combination. Others contain an evidence-based ingredient but at a dose far removed from what produced results in research.
Biology also refuses to behave as simply as marketing would like. Antioxidants provide a useful example. Exercise creates oxidative stress, and oxidative stress sounds bad, so taking large quantities of antioxidants appears perfectly logical. The problem is that reactive oxygen species are not simply damaging waste products. They are also involved in signalling some of the adaptations triggered by exercise. Research has suggested that high-dose supplementation with antioxidant vitamins such as C and E can, in certain contexts, blunt aspects of the body's response to training. The attempt to remove something that sounded harmful can interfere with part of the process through which training makes us better. The human body is full of these contradictions because physiology is a network of interacting systems rather than a collection of isolated problems waiting for individual ingredients.
Competitive athletes have another reason to be selective. Supplements can occasionally contain contaminants or undeclared substances, creating an anti-doping risk even when an athlete had no intention of taking a prohibited compound. This does not mean supplements should be feared or avoided. It means they should have a reason to be there and, where relevant, should come from appropriately tested sources. Before buying something, the useful question is remarkably simple: why am I taking this? If the answer is clear, evidence-based and relevant to your diet, health or training, there may be a very good reason. If the answer is that everybody at the gym takes it or an athlete on Instagram says it changed their life, perhaps the money would be better spent at the supermarket.
Food First Does Not Mean Food Only
There is an equally unhelpful argument at the opposite extreme, which claims that anyone eating a healthy diet should be able to obtain absolutely everything they need from food and therefore supplements are unnecessary. Nutrition is not that simple either. Bodies differ, diets differ, training loads differ and medical circumstances differ. Age, pregnancy, sun exposure, food preferences, absorption, energy expenditure and dietary restrictions can all change nutritional requirements. Someone training recreationally three times a week has very different practical needs from an elite athlete completing several sessions a day. A vegan athlete faces different nutritional considerations from an omnivorous athlete. Someone with a confirmed deficiency needs a different conversation altogether.
Iron deficiency is a good example. It can seriously affect health and athletic performance, and in some cases dietary changes alone will not correct it efficiently. Vitamin B12 supplementation can be essential for people consuming diets without reliable B12 sources. Vitamin D supplementation may be appropriate when blood levels are low. These are situations where supplementation is not evidence that food has failed. It is simply an effective nutritional or medical tool being used for a clear purpose. Ideally, suspected deficiencies should be assessed properly rather than guessed from symptoms or diagnosed by social media, because fatigue can have many causes and taking more of a nutrient is not automatically harmless simply because the nutrient is essential.
Then there are situations where convenience genuinely matters. If an athlete needs 30 grams of protein after training and has another appointment immediately afterwards, drinking a shake in thirty seconds may be far more realistic than carrying grilled chicken around all afternoon. A cyclist racing for several hours needs carbohydrates that can be consumed quickly while moving. Someone training in extreme heat may benefit from a properly formulated electrolyte drink. An athlete using creatine would have little reason to eat enormous quantities of meat every day merely to avoid taking five grams of powder. The point of a food-first philosophy is not to make nutrition deliberately inconvenient. It is to make sure the foundation is food and the additional products actually have a job to do.
Perhaps that is the simplest way to think about the whole subject. Build nutrition from the bottom rather than the top. Start with enough food to support the amount of activity you perform. Make sure there is adequate protein, carbohydrate and fat. Eat a varied diet containing vegetables, fruit, grains, legumes, nuts and seeds alongside appropriate sources of protein such as fish, meat, eggs, dairy or plant-based alternatives according to personal preference. Drink enough. Sleep enough. Recover properly. Once those basics are reasonably consistent, look at what may genuinely be missing and whether a supplement can solve a specific problem more effectively or conveniently than food.
For some people, the answer will include several supplements. For others, very few. Neither tells us how seriously that person takes their training. There is nothing more committed or advanced about swallowing six capsules with breakfast instead of eating a nutritionally adequate breakfast in the first place. Supplements are tools, and good tools are incredibly useful when they are used for the job they were designed to do. They become much less useful when we start collecting them because the industry has convinced us that everybody who trains must be deficient in something.
The fitness industry has produced some genuinely excellent products, and sports science has given athletes nutritional tools that previous generations simply did not have. We should use them. We should just use them intelligently. Use a supplement when it solves a real problem, when good evidence supports it, when convenience genuinely matters or when a qualified professional identifies a nutritional need. But do not confuse the finishing touches with the foundation. Long before sports nutrition became an industry, the nutrients we are chasing were already sitting in fish, meat, eggs, milk, grains, legumes, fruit, nuts and vegetables. The clue to how supplements should fit into our diets has been sitting in their name all along. They were supposed to supplement food, not teach us to believe that food was no longer enough.
Before The Supplement, There Was Food
Author: Nick Pelios
Spend enough time around gyms, endurance sports or almost any serious training environment and eventually somebody will ask what supplements you take. Not whether you take supplements, but which ones. Protein powder is almost assumed, followed by creatine, magnesium, electrolytes, omega-3, vitamin D, collagen, amino acids, greens powders, pre-workout formulas and whatever happens to be having its moment on social media that month. Watch a few training videos online and the algorithm quickly decides that your kitchen is apparently incapable of providing everything your body needs. Suddenly recovery requires a powder, hydration requires a special drink and a perfectly ordinary vitamin needs to arrive in a black container with the word "performance" printed somewhere on the front.
The strange thing is that most of the nutrients being advertised to us are not new discoveries. Human beings have been consuming them for thousands of years. Protein did not arrive with protein powder. It exists in meat, fish, eggs, dairy, legumes and many other foods. Omega-3 fatty acids existed before fish oil capsules. Magnesium did not begin life inside a supplement bottle. Calcium was present in dairy products long before somebody printed "bone support" on a label. Potassium is sitting inside potatoes, beans, fruit and vegetables without making much noise about it. Iron, zinc, selenium, B vitamins, carbohydrates and amino acids are all part of ordinary food. The supplement industry did not invent these nutrients. In many cases, it found ways to isolate them, concentrate them, package them conveniently and sell them back to us.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Supplements can be extremely useful, and pretending otherwise would simply replace one piece of bad nutritional advice with another. Someone who struggles to consume enough protein may find a shake incredibly practical. An athlete with a diagnosed iron deficiency may genuinely require supplementation. Carbohydrate gels make complete sense during long endurance events because carrying a bowl of rice on a bicycle is not particularly convenient. Caffeine can improve performance in certain situations, while creatine monohydrate has accumulated an unusually strong body of research supporting its use for strength, power and repeated high-intensity exercise. The problem is not that supplements exist. The problem is that somewhere along the way they moved from being the final few percent of a good nutritional strategy to being presented as the place where that strategy begins.
Someone starts going to the gym and almost immediately wants to know which protein powder to buy. They feel tired and start researching vitamins. Their muscles hurt after training and suddenly they need a recovery formula. They sweat heavily and assume they need a specialist electrolyte drink. Their sleep is poor, so another supplement appears. Meanwhile, the less glamorous questions often remain unanswered. Are they eating enough? How much protein are they actually consuming? Are there vegetables on the plate most days? When did they last eat fish? Are they eating enough carbohydrates for the amount of training they are doing? Are they drinking enough water? How much alcohol are they consuming? Are they sleeping six hours and expecting a capsule to somehow compensate for it?
These questions are not particularly exciting, but they explain an enormous amount. There is a reason serious sports nutrition organisations continue to promote a food-first approach. The Australian Institute of Sport places everyday food and appropriate sports nutrition at the foundation of athlete nutrition, while supplements are considered selectively when there is a clear reason for using them. The International Olympic Committee takes a similarly measured position. Despite the enormous number of products marketed to athletes, only a relatively small group of supplements have strong evidence for meaningful performance benefits in specific circumstances. The basic message is considerably less exciting than the marketing surrounding sports nutrition: eat properly, train consistently, recover properly and then identify whether something is genuinely missing. There is no discount code attached to that advice, which may partly explain why we hear much less of it.
Your Body Does Not Know What The Packaging Looks Like
Protein is probably the easiest example of how confused the conversation around sports nutrition has become. Protein supplements are useful. They are convenient, relatively inexpensive per serving, easy to transport and simple to measure. For someone with high protein requirements or a busy schedule, a shake can make meeting a daily target considerably easier. But there is nothing biologically magical about protein simply because it arrived as a powder. Once protein is digested, the body is dealing with amino acids. Those amino acids can come from whey, but they can also come from eggs, Greek yogurt, chicken, beef, fish, cottage cheese, lentils, beans and countless other foods. Different sources have different amino acid profiles and levels of digestibility, and athletes following plant-based diets may need to pay greater attention to quantity and variety, but the underlying principle remains remarkably simple. Protein powder is a convenient source of protein, not a different category of nutrition.
The same applies to many of the nutrients that now occupy entire shelves of supplement stores. Oily fish provides omega-3 fatty acids. Nuts, seeds, legumes, whole grains and leafy vegetables provide magnesium. Dairy products and various other foods provide calcium. Meat, seafood and legumes provide iron, although the form of iron and its absorption differ considerably between foods. Eggs provide protein, choline, selenium, vitamins and fats. Fruit and vegetables provide potassium, vitamin C, folate, fibre and a huge range of compounds that rarely receive the same attention as whichever isolated nutrient is fashionable at the time. Whole grains provide carbohydrates, fibre, minerals and B vitamins. None of these foods contains only one useful thing, and that is precisely the point.
Take a sardine. If we describe it using the language of supplements, we could call it a package containing protein, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin B12, selenium, vitamin D and, when the bones are eaten, calcium. An egg could be described as protein, choline, selenium and several vitamins surrounded by fat. Greek yogurt becomes protein, calcium and live cultures. A lentil becomes carbohydrate, protein, fibre, iron and folate. We can break food down this way if we want to understand its nutritional composition, but eventually we have to remember to put it back together again. Humans do not naturally eat individual nutrients. We eat foods containing complex combinations of macronutrients, micronutrients, fibre and thousands of other compounds within a physical structure often described as the food matrix. That structure can influence digestion, absorption, satiety and metabolism in ways that cannot always be reproduced simply by extracting one component and putting it into a capsule.
Creatine provides an excellent example of why a food-first approach should not become an ideological food-only approach. Creatine occurs naturally in our bodies and is present in meat and fish. However, achieving the amounts commonly used in evidence-based supplementation protocols entirely through diet would require eating impractically large quantities of those foods. Creatine monohydrate therefore offers something genuinely useful: a convenient, inexpensive and well-studied way of increasing muscular creatine stores beyond what most people obtain through their normal diet. Caffeine provides another example. Coffee naturally contains it, but a standardized product can allow an athlete to control dosage and timing more precisely. Dietary nitrate occurs naturally in foods such as beetroot and leafy greens, while concentrated products can provide a predictable amount for specific performance situations. These products make sense because they solve a real problem involving dosage, timing or convenience rather than because normal food has somehow become nutritionally inadequate.
There is also one thing that the obsession with individual micronutrients sometimes makes athletes forget: training requires actual food because training requires energy. A cyclist completing hours of endurance work, a runner covering high weekly mileage, a strength athlete trying to build muscle or a freediver training repeatedly throughout the week all need sufficient energy to support that work. The body needs carbohydrates and fats for fuel, protein for tissue repair and adequate overall energy availability to maintain normal physiological function. Someone can take magnesium, creatine, omega-3, vitamin D and a beautifully branded recovery formula every morning, but if they chronically under-eat, sleep badly and train excessively, another supplement is unlikely to address the real problem. Sometimes the body is not asking for another capsule. Sometimes it is simply asking for lunch.
Why Supplements Are So Easy To Sell
The fitness industry has found an almost perfect customer in the athlete because athletes care about small improvements. Tell somebody who does not exercise that a product might improve recovery slightly and they may not care. Tell somebody who has spent six months trying to add ten kilograms to a squat, remove thirty seconds from a cycling climb, run a faster 10K or reach a new depth that something could potentially improve performance by even a small amount and you immediately have their attention. That is not stupidity or gullibility. In many ways it is exactly the mentality that makes people improve at sport. They pay attention to details, tolerate inconvenience and are willing to experiment if they believe something may help them perform better.
The easiest way to sell to that person is not necessarily to promise a miracle. It is often more effective to suggest that something might be missing. Perhaps recovery could be better because magnesium intake is low. Perhaps amino acids are needed around training. Perhaps every sweaty session requires an electrolyte product. Perhaps inflammation is preventing progress, the immune system needs support, hormones need optimising, the gut needs improving or sleep needs another intervention. Once nutrition is presented this way, the athlete can easily develop the feeling that the normal state of the body is one of constant deficiency and that every problem has an ingredient waiting to correct it. There is always another metric to optimise and therefore always another product that might help.
This is where the gap between marketing and evidence becomes important. Sports nutrition research has identified supplements that can improve performance in specific circumstances, but that list is considerably shorter than the shelves of a supplement store suggest. Creatine and caffeine are among the clearest examples, while nitrate and certain buffering agents can also have applications depending on the activity and athlete. Carbohydrate and electrolyte products are valuable in appropriate endurance and environmental conditions. Supplements are also important when correcting genuine nutritional deficiencies. Beyond these clearer examples, evidence becomes much more variable. Some products contain ingredients that have been studied individually but are sold as complex mixtures that have never been tested in that exact combination. Others contain an evidence-based ingredient but at a dose far removed from what produced results in research.
Biology also refuses to behave as simply as marketing would like. Antioxidants provide a useful example. Exercise creates oxidative stress, and oxidative stress sounds bad, so taking large quantities of antioxidants appears perfectly logical. The problem is that reactive oxygen species are not simply damaging waste products. They are also involved in signalling some of the adaptations triggered by exercise. Research has suggested that high-dose supplementation with antioxidant vitamins such as C and E can, in certain contexts, blunt aspects of the body's response to training. The attempt to remove something that sounded harmful can interfere with part of the process through which training makes us better. The human body is full of these contradictions because physiology is a network of interacting systems rather than a collection of isolated problems waiting for individual ingredients.
Competitive athletes have another reason to be selective. Supplements can occasionally contain contaminants or undeclared substances, creating an anti-doping risk even when an athlete had no intention of taking a prohibited compound. This does not mean supplements should be feared or avoided. It means they should have a reason to be there and, where relevant, should come from appropriately tested sources. Before buying something, the useful question is remarkably simple: why am I taking this? If the answer is clear, evidence-based and relevant to your diet, health or training, there may be a very good reason. If the answer is that everybody at the gym takes it or an athlete on Instagram says it changed their life, perhaps the money would be better spent at the supermarket.
Food First Does Not Mean Food Only
There is an equally unhelpful argument at the opposite extreme, which claims that anyone eating a healthy diet should be able to obtain absolutely everything they need from food and therefore supplements are unnecessary. Nutrition is not that simple either. Bodies differ, diets differ, training loads differ and medical circumstances differ. Age, pregnancy, sun exposure, food preferences, absorption, energy expenditure and dietary restrictions can all change nutritional requirements. Someone training recreationally three times a week has very different practical needs from an elite athlete completing several sessions a day. A vegan athlete faces different nutritional considerations from an omnivorous athlete. Someone with a confirmed deficiency needs a different conversation altogether.
Iron deficiency is a good example. It can seriously affect health and athletic performance, and in some cases dietary changes alone will not correct it efficiently. Vitamin B12 supplementation can be essential for people consuming diets without reliable B12 sources. Vitamin D supplementation may be appropriate when blood levels are low. These are situations where supplementation is not evidence that food has failed. It is simply an effective nutritional or medical tool being used for a clear purpose. Ideally, suspected deficiencies should be assessed properly rather than guessed from symptoms or diagnosed by social media, because fatigue can have many causes and taking more of a nutrient is not automatically harmless simply because the nutrient is essential.
Then there are situations where convenience genuinely matters. If an athlete needs 30 grams of protein after training and has another appointment immediately afterwards, drinking a shake in thirty seconds may be far more realistic than carrying grilled chicken around all afternoon. A cyclist racing for several hours needs carbohydrates that can be consumed quickly while moving. Someone training in extreme heat may benefit from a properly formulated electrolyte drink. An athlete using creatine would have little reason to eat enormous quantities of meat every day merely to avoid taking five grams of powder. The point of a food-first philosophy is not to make nutrition deliberately inconvenient. It is to make sure the foundation is food and the additional products actually have a job to do.
Perhaps that is the simplest way to think about the whole subject. Build nutrition from the bottom rather than the top. Start with enough food to support the amount of activity you perform. Make sure there is adequate protein, carbohydrate and fat. Eat a varied diet containing vegetables, fruit, grains, legumes, nuts and seeds alongside appropriate sources of protein such as fish, meat, eggs, dairy or plant-based alternatives according to personal preference. Drink enough. Sleep enough. Recover properly. Once those basics are reasonably consistent, look at what may genuinely be missing and whether a supplement can solve a specific problem more effectively or conveniently than food.
For some people, the answer will include several supplements. For others, very few. Neither tells us how seriously that person takes their training. There is nothing more committed or advanced about swallowing six capsules with breakfast instead of eating a nutritionally adequate breakfast in the first place. Supplements are tools, and good tools are incredibly useful when they are used for the job they were designed to do. They become much less useful when we start collecting them because the industry has convinced us that everybody who trains must be deficient in something.
The fitness industry has produced some genuinely excellent products, and sports science has given athletes nutritional tools that previous generations simply did not have. We should use them. We should just use them intelligently. Use a supplement when it solves a real problem, when good evidence supports it, when convenience genuinely matters or when a qualified professional identifies a nutritional need. But do not confuse the finishing touches with the foundation. Long before sports nutrition became an industry, the nutrients we are chasing were already sitting in fish, meat, eggs, milk, grains, legumes, fruit, nuts and vegetables. The clue to how supplements should fit into our diets has been sitting in their name all along. They were supposed to supplement food, not teach us to believe that food was no longer enough.