The potential for supplement use to result in doping infringements is likely to be of concern for anyone involved in sports nutrition. The available data indicates that between 40-70% of athletes use supplements, and that between 10-15% of supplements may contain prohibited substances. Such data indicates that there is a considerable risk of accidental or inadvertent doping through using supplements. Accordingly, this paper sets out to provide an overview of the currently available empirical evidence of accidental doping by supplement use. In carrying out this task, the authors refer to press releases and proxy measures associated with nutritional supplement use, as well as statistical data on supplement contamination rates and doping infractions. A number of different indications as to the percentage of doping cases that might be attributed to supplement use are presented, ranging from 6.4% to 8.8%. Such percentages are not comparable; instead they are provided as indications as to how difficult it is to ascertain or estimate the scale of this problem. Although some forms of estimation can be made, it is suggested that it is currently not possible to quantify the scale of the problem. By way of conclusion, it is argued that antidoping regulators may wish to review current data gathering and information provision systems so that the problem of inadvertent doping can be more directly assessed as a factor in sports doping overall.

During the past few years considerable debate has arisen within academic journals with respect to the use of smart drugs or cognitive enhancement pharmaceuticals. The following paper seeks to examine the foundations of this cognitive enhancement debate using the example of methylphenidate use among college students. The argument taken is that much of the enhancement debate rests upon inflated assumptions about the ability of such drugs to enhance and over-estimations of either the size of the current market for such drugs or the rise in popularity as drugs for enhancing cognitive abilities. This article provides an overview of the empirical evidence that methylphenidate has the ability to significantly improve cognitive abilities in healthy individuals, and examines whether the presumed uptake of the drug is either as socially significant as implied or growing to the extent that it requires urgent regulatory attention. In addition, it reviews the evidence of side-effects for the use of methylphenidate which may be an influential factor in whether an individual decides to use such drugs. The primary conclusions are that neither drug efficacy, nor the benefit-to-risk balance, nor indicators of current or growing demand provide sufficient evidence that methylphenidate is a suitable example of a cognitive enhancer with mass appeal. In light of these empirically based conclusions, the article discusses why methylphenidate might have become seen as a smart drug or cognitive enhancer.

Race and ethnicity are imprecise markers of the genotypic and sociocultural determinants of health, argue the authors.

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Summary.Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore genetic contributions to disparities in health were developed using in-depth qualitative interviews with editorial staff from nineteen genetics journals, focusing on the methodological and conceptual mechanisms required to make race/ethnicity a genetic variable. As such, these analyses explore how and why race/ethnicity comes to be used in the context of genetic research, set against the background of continuing critiques from anthropology and related human sciences that focus on the social construction, structural correlates and limited genetic validity of racial/ethnic categories. The analyses demonstrate how these critiques have failed to engage geneticists, and how geneticists use a range of essentially cultural devices to protect and separate their use of race/ethnicity as a genetic construct from its use as a societal and social science resource. Given its multidisciplinary, biosocial nature and the cultural gaze of its ethnographic methodologies, anthropology is well placed to explore the cultural separation of science and society, and of natural and social science disciplines. Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore disparities in health suggest that moving beyond genetic explanations of innate difference might benefit from a more even-handed critique of how both the natural and social sciences tend to essentialize selective elements of race/ethnicity. Drawing on the example of HIV/AIDS, this paper demonstrates how public health has been undermined by the use of race/ethnicity as an analytical variable, both as a cipher for innate genetic differences in susceptibility and response to treatment, and in its use to identify 'core groups' at greater risk of becoming infected and infecting others. Clearly, a tendency for biological reductionism can place many biomedical issues beyond the scope of public health interventions, while socio-cultural essentialization has tended to stigmatize 'unhealthy behaviours' and the communities where these are more prevalent.