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CPSDA Sports RDs' Guiding Principles

• We are Support Service Directors who treat everyone with respect and promote the value of character and education. 
• We are ethical advisors who track outcome-based research, maintain transparency in our professional relationships, and fully support anti-doping initiatives.
• We are passionate about the character-building process cultivated by athletics, and as a result, we are valuable recruiting assets for our organization. 
• We are unrelenting "food-first" advocates to help ensure athletes' health and safety; and we develop partnerships with other safety-driven organizations to ensure fueling solutions are sustainable. 
• We are credible practitioners who stay ahead of the curve on banned substances, performance and recovery topics, and on body composition assessment. 
• We are committed to mentoring athletes; we share insights and educational resources with Support Service Directors; and we mentor students who seek to follow in our footsteps. 
• We are dedicated to community outreach with young people who represent the next generation of college, Olympic, professional and tactical (military) athletes; and we strive to assist those who have passed their performance primes to safely de-train with safety and dignity.
  

Those entrusted in the circle of care around athletes—sport coaches, strength coaches, sports medicine personnel and Sports RDs--learn early on how important it is to build a wall of protection around their players.  Insidious agents of exploitation are never far away.  But in an ever expanding food and dietary supplement supply system that now spans the globe, fortifying that wall of protection isn’t enough anymore.  Sports RDs will soon be relied upon to take proactive measures—preemptive security measures—to prevent potentially hazardous events from occurring in the “feed to fuel” continuum.

Why has the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) recently decided to prioritize food and dietary supplement security?  In a word, globalization, which the FDA says is "fundamentally altering the economic and security landscape" of the American food supply.  The global shift in the development and delivery of food and dietary supplements is making it increasingly difficult for the FDA to identify the “source” of a nutrition product—which is where safety and security measures begin--and those sourcing difficulties are rippling through the food supply and into our athletes. 

Most of us understand that air, soil and water pollution in less regulated countries has been posing an increased risk to food and food ingredients for many years now. Improper manufacturing and inadequate delivery systems both home and abroad also play a role in food contamination. But one of the newest threats, based on recent FDA documents, comes from profiteers who are deliberately altering supplements—subtracting or substituting more expensive ingredients for less expensive ones—with little regard for the information written on the label.  It begs the question: if dietary supplements can be manipulated for economic gain, can they as easily be manufactured to do deliberate harm on a global scale?

The FDA has the staff to “regulate” only about 10 percent of imported goods under its purview.  Those products come from 300,000 facilities in 150 countries.  An estimated 10-15 percent of all food consumed in U.S. households is imported, but that includes two-thirds of fruits and vegetables and 80% of seafood.  Moreover, 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients in medications sold here are manufactured outside the U.S.

The FDA's recent enactment of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA, January 2011) is a template for regulatory agencies worldwide "to systematically build in prudent preventive measures across the food system, from the farm to the table," but that task is daunting.  Despite steadily rising numbers of imported foods and supplements, FDA has the staff to properly inspect barely one percent of it.  And FDA does not expect to have the resources anytime soon to adequately keep pace with the pressures of globalization.  The Government Accountability Office (“GAO”) in 2008 recommended that FDA increase inspections of foreign drug establishments and improve information it receives to manage overseas inspections.  But at the current pace, it would take nine years for FDA to inspect every high-priority pharmaceutical facility just one time.

Food safety compromised by careless or unclean processes has become a common occurrence.  We read about another new incident most every week.  Food-borne illnesses reportedly affect one in every six Americans each year.  Now add to that very troubling statistic the increasing incidence of dietary supplements that are “deliberately” adulterated—intentionally spiked or diluted, most often to juice profit margins--which we as Sports RDs know is the kind of thing that puts athletes at risk of testing positive for banned substances.

So who in the athletes’ circle of protection is going to be charged with minimizing the growing risk in the food supply?  It will, almost certainly, be the full-time Sports RD, at least for those athletic programs that have one.

Let’s get ready. We’re going to have to put more controls in place to minimize the risk of contaminated foods and supplements, and do so with the realization that those risks rise as teams travel, especially overseas.  That process will begin with a carefully considered plan under the heading of “Food and Supplement Security,” and a finished document will require time, thought and an abundance of research.  This journey, for Sports RDs, has just begun, so we’ll be calling on CPSDA members from time to time for their best ideas.  It is, at the very least, a worthwhile endeavor, and one we should play a lead role in pursuing.  We’ll keep everyone posted through the CPSDA ListServ and our web site: www.SportsRD.org