The European Specialist Sports Nutrition Alliance (ESSNA) has claimed that a lack of understanding over the role and use of sports nutrition continues to exist amongst political leaders and the public. With this in mind, the trade body is launching a new booklet to correct popular misconceptions over sports nutrition products.
ESSNA has claimed that politicians and the public continue to mistakenly associate carefully regulated sports nutrition products with banned or illegal supplements and substances; in addition to clinging to the belief that sports nutrition products are the preserve of bodybuilders and elite strength athletes.
ESSNA’s booklet, What is Sports Nutrition?, is intended to promote the broader use of sports nutrition and inform the public of the stringent regulations governing the content and manufacture of such products.
The European Commission recently committed to the production of a report on sports nutrition products. This followed a landmark European Parliament vote adopting a regulation to the legal framework and government sports nutrition, and ensuring that such products fall under general food law.
ESSNA, which both represents the sports nutrition sector and works to ensure its compliance with EU regulations, has committed to engaging fully with the Commission’s report in the expectation that the new legal framework will inspire greater innovation within the sector.
Dr Adam Carey, Chair of ESSNA, said “Our goal in producing this booklet is to provide both politicians and the public with the information necessary to correct what are still common misconceptions of sports nutrition products. The fact is that sports nutrition products are used regularly by members of the public, in addition to professional sportspeople, and can help considerably in improving training performance, hydration and recovery at whatever level of participation.”
He added, “Our industry is a very vigilant one, and we work extremely hard to ensure that every company in our sector adheres to the very strict regulations in place to govern the content of products. By law, sports nutrition products can only contain vitamins, minerals and food and herb ingredients – and no legitimate product should contain anything you would not find in commonplace foodstuffs.”
The ESSNA booklet What is Sports Nutrition? can be downloaded via the ESSNA website (www.essna.com).
The European Specialist Sports Nutrition Alliance is an alliance of European sports nutrition companies that was formed in December 2003.
Members of the Alliance include Adams Food Ingredients, Aminolabs, Body Temple UK, Carbery, CLF Distribution, First Milk, Garnell Corporation, Iovate Health Sciences, Mass Nutrition Kostexperten, Maxinutrition, myprotein.co.uk, NSF, Prometeus, Sci-MX Nutrition, Tropicana Health and Fitness, US Nutrition, USN UK, Volac, Weider Germany, NBTY Europe, BodyBuilding.com, Glanbia Performance Nutrition, PhD Nutrition, CytoSport UK, Future Nutrition.
Associate members of the Alliance include HFMA (The UK Health Food Manufacturers’ Association), Weider Publishing, Fitnessboutique, LGC, Cambridge Commodities, Healthy Inspirations, The Sales and Marketing Partnership, Affordable Supplements.
