New Creatine Ban for Teens in New York

_{Story courtesy of PricePlow.com}

You’ve heard about disinformation news campaigns. Now you can see in real-time what happens when your local legislators react to them without doing enough research!

If you haven’t read what’s going on in New York, then take a minute to understand the extreme bill introduced in the New York legislature that would ban the sale of creatine to individuals under 18 years of age and penalize stores that do not check for ID from anyone who looks under the age of 25.

That’s right – the most well-studied and widely-used sports nutrition supplement outside of protein and caffeine is under attack from legislative blowhards in the Big Apple – and it’s painfully clear they haven’t done their homework.

Introduced by the Democrat assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, Bill #A04712 seeks to ban the sale of creatine to anyone under the age of 18, and threatens financial penalties for any establishment caught in violation of the proposed law. Specifically, the bill reads:

Before going further, you should read the entire bill here — it’s not very long at all.

Where Did This Come From?!

You’re probably wondering how this whole preposterous situation even got started. Well, it turns out that a study was published in Pediatrics: Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics[2] was the catalyst for all of this.

The paper’s objective read:

”Our objective was to determine to what extent health food stores would recommend and/or sell creatine and testosterone boosters to a 15-year-old boy customer.”

Authors of the paper used a relatively small sample size of 244 health food stores located around the US and asked sales attendants a list questions (via telephone) concerning which supplements they would recommend to a 15-year-old male high school athlete.

Following the telephone interviews, researchers concluded:

“Health food store employees frequently recommend creatine and testosterone boosters for boy high school athletes. In response to these findings, pediatricians should inform their teenage patients, especially athletes, about safe, healthy methods to improve athletic performance and discourage them from using creatine or testosterone boosters. Retailers and state legislatures should also consider banning the sale of these products to minors.”

This singular paper is the entire reason behind the NY State Legislature’s crusade to ban creatine sales.

Let’s just sit back and look at all of the reasons this is completely ridiculous…

•  The idea that creatine is harmful to your kidneys or other metabolic markers has been disproven over and over again, as shown in the research listed directly above. The idea it’s not safe has been wrong for over 20 years now!
•  Further, creatine has been successfully and safely used in several studies involving children (not even teenagers – but children), ranging from research on headaches to severe muscular diseases. In all cases, it was shown to be beneficial.
•  Creatine is already found in meat
• There’s a common alternative to supplementing creatine – eat a lot of beef, chicken, and turkey.
• By the NY State Legislature’s reasoning, we should therefore ban the sale of beef to anyone under the age of 18! Is that where this is heading? When and where does this end, and how do you expect to enforce it all?
• Creatine supplements combined with home exercise improved functional performance without significant adverse effects in patients with polymyositis or dermatomyositis.

Takeaway

Suffice it to say the New York state government needs to drop this “nanny state” mentality of getting in the way of an individual’s choice to do what they please. Nowhere was this more evident than when the recently tried to ban the sale of supersized soft drinks.[10]

It’s painfully clear that Linda Rosenthal has not reviewed enough research on the subject of creatine, and is committing a knee-jerk public reaction. It is absolutely inexcusable for a person in a position of power to wield it without concern for factual, scientific knowledge. It’s time to expect more intelligent behavior from our elected leaders.

We need to get back to living in a world of personal responsibility and honest research. It’s ridiculous enough when they try to ban something like large soft drinks, but when healthy products like creatine get caught in the overbearing crosshairs of big government legislators, it’s a tragic waste of resources.

There is a serious problem when you have elites living in the Upper West Side using their power to dictate what someone in Rochester can put in their body. Now is the time to get the government out of our personal lives, and this means voting these clowns out of office. Stop wasting taxpayer funds with trivial legislation such as this and focus on making New York safe!

There are a pile of studies that show creatine helps enhance health, which you can find here!