A news item in the Fairfax press today reports that ASADA is now focusing their attention on several over-the-counter supplements, and investigating their use by athletes . This is a long way away from investigating the peptide menace described on the “blackest day in Australian sporting history” at that now famous press conference; back then we had portrayed to us an image of organised criminals managing large scale importation rackets of weird sounding hormone-stimulating peptides – when they weren’t busy fixing matches, that is . . .

Even here at Inside Sport we didn’t know a lot about peptides when they were spoken of as such a dark menace. So I asked one of our best writers, Aaron Scott, to find out about them. The results of his weeks of research is the lead story in our latest issue, now on sale. Who’d have thunk it? In fact there is zero performance-enhancing benefit in them, and the tales of their extraordinary anabolic (muscle-building), body fat-shedding qualities is only heard on bizarre bodybuilding internet forums. It most certainly is NOT found in any reputable medical journal.

Fact: they simply don’t work for normal healthy people.

Which is not to say that anyone should be injecting them. But that is another story. Read it in our latest issue.

What is perplexing is that ASADA should have been focusing their resources on them so intensely . . . Now, apparently, ASADA is investigating the claims made on the labels of supplements sold in health food stores . . . Certain supplements claim to contain IGF1, amongst other illegal (when injected) peptides . . .

Here is the news: IGF1 is found in steak, and most animal proteins. Most of us ingest it every day.

Here is more news: the chances of any traces of IGF1 getting past the acid bath in the human gut and into the blood stream is nil. Again, the idea that eating it will make you grow faster is rubbish only espoused by people attempting to sell magic potions to gullible people.

I know this because I researched the use of bovine colostrum for this magazine about a decade ago – around about the time this substance (the first milk derived from cows after giving birth is teeming with IGF1) was actually being administered to the Australian cycling team by their very own team doctor! Does anyone in the halls of power in Canberra remember that episode?

IGF1 is a protein. Taking colostrum is a lot like having a drink of milk.

STILL we have not a single athlete pinged by ASADA after their dire warnings . . .

What next, we wonder?