Wait Till You Get A Load of This Supplement Company — These Guys Make Isagenix Look Like Angels
Sports With Alternatives To Steroids, or SWATS, is a purported athletic nutrition company in Alabama, who have caught a lot of attention for getting a number of top-ranked athletes, including golfer Vijay Singh and a few NFL football players, to take their products. Their chief product is called The Ultimate Spray, and consists mainly of — wait for it — ground up deer antlers. Yes, that’s right. You see, budding deer antlers are said to be some of the fastest growing tissue on earth, and to contain high amounts of a growth hormone called IGF-1, so there are these deer farms in New Zealand where they remove the deer’s antlers before they’ve fully solidified (this doesn’t harm or kill the deer and the antlers grow back) and grind them up and freeze-dry them to produce this spray. You’re supposed to put it under your tongue since that’s how it’s supposed to soak through the tissues in your mouth, bypassing your stomach.
Deer antler is supposedly an ancient Chinese medical preparation which — oh, fuck, you can just stop right here. We’re already at one of the tried and true sources of woo — traditional Chinese medicine. In ancient China they would cut up or grind up any part of any plant or animal and ascribe various health effects to them. These were assigned for various reasons; the seed pod of the velvet bean plant, for example, looks like an erect cock and balls, so the ancient Chinese thought it an aphrodisiac. While it is possible to extract useful medications from plants and some animals (especially venomous ones), a) they often don’t have the effects ascribed to them by herbal medicine; b) they’re still drugs and c) the drug extraction process allows for much more controlled dosages, and a safer and effective product. So if you hear "traditional Chinese medicine", remember that it’s not necessarily safer, and probably less effective, than "Western medicine" based on scientifically developed treatments.
Still with me? Okay. Back to deer antlers and IGF-1.
Growth hormone supplementation — including IGF-1 — is banned by many sports leagues, but here’s the kicker: only when it’s injected. Because only when it’s injected does the growth hormone actually work. Otherwise, it’s broken down by the body. There’s no evidence that this formulation gives you any of the claimed benefits which include, but are not limited to, greater muscle strength, faster healng times, and anti-aging effects. At $65 a bottle, that’s a lot of money for a supplement that does effectively nothing.
Getting people off steroids sounds like a noble goal to me. I’d fully support a way to increase athletic performance that didn’t involve injecting hormones into your body that turned you into a raging roid beast. Such a thing is the holy grail for athletes, and if it emerged would change sports and biology forever. But antler juice ain’t it. And these guys are hucksters.
No joke — "Deer Antler Man" Mitch Ross is pretty much the Kenn Viselman of athletic supplementation. A couple of illustrative stories — a drama and a comedy — will show you why.
First, the drama: In 2009 a football player, David Vobora, tested positive for methyltestosterone in his urine. He sued SWATS, claiming that the chemical came from their antler juice. SWATS, Mitch Ross, and the lab which actually formulates and manufactures the product for SWATS (SWATS is just a label) claim that no such contamination occurred. But instead of showing up in court to defend themselves, what do they do? They shut the company down and reopen it under a different DBA name to dodge liability.[0] Real smooth, guys, but that only serves to make you look even more like the classic snake-oil salesman: skipping town once the people get wise to your scam.
I don’t know what’s happening here. Three possibilities present themselves:
SWATS antler juice formula actually does contain, or contained, methyltestosterone.
Vobora just happened to get a bad batch that was contaminated with methyltestosterone (because SWATS is made in a steroid lab?).
Vobora is full of shit and is using SWATS as a scapegoat to mask his own steroid usage.
What I do know is that if SWATS did contain a steroid, that would be the only possible way it could have significant, measurable beneficial effects for sports or bodybuilding. I also know that before he started his antler-juice business, Mitch Ross used to sell — wait for it — steroids.
Because of the IGF-1 and the possibility of methyltestosterone in the SWATS formula, a number of sports leagues banned the substance. Aggressive pressure from SWATS and the athletes who swear by it led to a reversal. SWATS blew up into a whole controversy a couple years back when Sports Illustrated got wind of this story. But an interesting side effect of the kerfuffle was to create an entire market for antler juice, as other supplement companies started getting in on the hype and athletes searched for something — anything — to give them an edge.
So much for the drama. Now for the comedy. You see, while the deer antler spray is SWATS’s most famous, and premier, product, that’s not the only thing they sell. They also sell things called SWATS Performance Chips, and wait till you find out what these are.
They’re hologram stickers which were all the rage in schoolyards back in the 80s. I am NOT making this up. SWATS claims that they are "programmed" with "waves" or "vibrations" (whether the waves are of light or sound seems to change every time it’s brought up). The idea being — you know when you tap your smartcard to get on the train or bus, or some new cellphones can communicate by being tapped together? They are actually communicating with a very low-power radio signal that only extends a few millimeters or centimeters. It’s actually a really cool technology that’s found its way into numerous applications, including inventory management.
The rationale behind the stickers (or "chips" in SWATS nomenclature — lol) is that the molecules in them function as tiny radio transmitters which communicate with the cells in your body, instructing them to produce nutrients or increase energy flow through the meridians. Are you laughing yet? THERE ARE NO SUCH THINGS AS MERIDIANS. ACUPUNCTURE DOESN’T WORK, AND THE BODY DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT.
This is actually a variant of a sales pitch delivered by a scummy MLM called LifeWave, which sells the same sort of thing. At least they call them "patches" instead of trying to sound all high tech by calling them "chips". A typical LifeWave patch contains a mixture of "amino acids, water, stabilized oxygen, and organics" that function as "nanoscale antennas"[1] to transmit magical beams of positive thought into your body’s cells — through your meridian lines of course. The ingredients that function as magical The Secret happy-thought radios can probably all be found at your local grocery store; as an example, LifeWave recently lost the right to patent a formula on the basis that the formula contains honey rather than bee pollen.
hold on, i have to tune my vinaigrette — picking up a station in norway here
also how the fuck do you stabilize oxygen
The idea that you could gain health benefits not even by eating healthy foods, but by simply rubbing healthy foods on your meridians — or that health foods so rubbed constitute "nanotechnology" — should be risible on its face to any sane human being. But that hasn’t stopped Suzanne Somers from repeatedly endorsing the products, and a lot of people from buying them.
Anyway, both SWATS and LifeWave use the same explanation right down to the same analogy: exposure to sunlight causes your body to produce vitamin D, and they claim to have developed a light wavelength that enables your body to produce other nutrients, like potassium.
YOU CANNOT SYNTHESIZE POTASSIUM
Did these guys even take a chemistry class? Do they understand how atoms, molecules, and so forth work? Come on. Any way you look at it, this stuff has the whiff of "scam" all over it. But that doesn’t stop jocks from buying the stuff from the bucketful. Some of you must be thinking "ha ha, jocks are dumb". And football often does lead to brain damage (for which, yes, you can buy a product from SWATS, the "Concussion Cap", that is claimed to radiate magical beams of neuron-repairing meridian energy into your skull). But an athlete in search of an edge will try virtually anything to get it. We evaluate claims in light of risks and possible benefits, not facts; and the SWATS program advertises huge benefits with very little perceived risk. That the benefits are actually nil is immaterial; the placebo effect means that when they tape the patches and spritz the deer spray, they feel more energetic and performant, and that’s enough to convince them that this crap is working so they keep buying.
Mitch Ross says I can win the Super Bowl by using his spray and chips. How are you gonna counter that? Science? Huh huh. Nerrrrrrrds.
However, for products that do nothing, SWATS sure is expensive; a tiny 30-ml bottle of The Ultimate Spray costs you 65 bones; the Jacked Spray costs 100. A sheet of… motherfucking STICKERS for God’s sake… costs you 20. That’s American dollars, by the way, which seem to be rallying in the world currency market. NFL players make fucktons of money and can blow their wad on whatever they choose; I’m more concerned about the average person who, in dire economic times, believes the claims and wastes hundreds or thousands of dollars on their money to get an edge in college ball, or look younger and stay more active.
In conclusion, if you thought Isagenix was a hilarious ripoff, next to the likes of SWATS and LifeWave, Isagenix are honest legitimate businessmen. Health scams, especially conjoined with MLM, are a fairly deep rabbithole, and I both shudder and laugh to think what lies at the bottom.
[0] http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/nfl/news/20130129/the-strange-lab-that-lured-numerous-athletes/
[1] http://www.nanotechnologystore.com/FAQ.html
Note: I originally wrote this rant on August 11, 2013. In September of 2013 the company in question was raided by state police and shut down. I guess in the end SWATS couldn't stand up to the SWATs!
