desperation.
after my brain injury i bought every and anything under the sun to heal damaged neurons that after so many years would likely not be healed.
i threw away about 50 bottles of crap about a year ago :)
It is very possible that the products that Dr. Carson was endorsing actually do help. In part of the video he even mentions that there is no way to prove why he was feeling better.
A long time a go I was a nationally ranked bicycle racer. Whenever I decide to start training hard again I usually start taking alpha lipoic acid and acetyl l-carnitine. Theoretically they have antioxidant properties and help metabolize your fat reserves at a higher rate. To me they seem to help on longer rides (over 40 miles) especially when you are trying to keep up a good pace. The benefit may be mostly psychological, but it seems to have a measurable effect on my heart rate monitor vs my measured energy output.
The first 20 or 30 miles you are running mostly on glycogen reserves that are stored in your muscles and what you have eaten in the previous 12 hours or so. When you get over 30 miles you start transitioning to sugary foods and drinks you have been consuming on the ride and your fat reserves. If you haven’t been eating and drinking enough and you use up all of your easily used previously mentioned carbohydrate reserves you get what is known as the “bonk”. This is when your body starts relying mostly on your fat reserves to push the pedals around. Your blood sugar drops, you feel like crap and the amount of energy you can produce is severely limited.
This is an over simplification because generally when I go on a longer ride I always try to eat and drink enough to maintain my blood sugar level but the amount of energy coming from fat reserves tends to increase as the miles increase. To me it feels like I am able to produce more energy and keep my speed up longer when I am taking the supplements. Is it from the supplements or because I believe that the supplements are working in the way that they were designed to.
Even with an advanced pulse monitor that records my heart rate every 5 seconds, jabbing my finger to measure my blood sugar part way through the ride, energy output monitoring instrumentation and logs of my rides plotted with timed checkpoints and GPS... I still have no way of actually proving anything one way or the other. But I still believe they help and would take them all of the time, but my wife claims that they give me an unpleasant body odor and make my intestinal gas smell worse. I believe this is more likely from the increased exercise and the waste products produced by metabolizing fat. But I try to keep her happy.
So there you have it... my wordy full confession of how I help support the nutritional supplement industry despite being a skeptic of pretty much everything.