Can taking certain supplements (legal) improve your fighting game skills?

I don’t know if this thread is allowed or not (I read the rules but can’t find anything applicable), so please delete this thread, mods, if you don’t approve.

I’m a casual online player of SSF4. I’ve been taking 1 gram of fish oil everyday for the past month and I’ve noticed my cognitive abilities have improved tremendously. And more relevantly, my reaction times seem to be quicker when I play online. For example, I can react much faster to a jump-in with an anti air. Also, I can FAC more consistently.

I’m wondering if top players at EVO take certain legal supplements to improve their mood/cognitive ability. It seems that if they work, it could really make a difference in a tournament setting.

Take a E-tank a day and feel the (s)urge to buy DLC.

I fuel up on energy drinks before tournaments.

beer and cigarettes are the 3s community’s supplements of choice

smoke crack and watch your reaction time improve

More likely you practicing everyday has led to you being a good player, rather than some bullshit supplement that doesn’t work to make you a good player.

Alternative medicine is a marketing term for superstitious remedies that aren’t supported by testing and/or evidence. They’re essentially a form of idiot tax.

Rather than wasting money supporting unscrupulous companies, why not just practice?

i suppose that stuff could make you better, but like everybody else said just practice, there’s nothing better than hard work.

I work for a supplement company so let me give you the 411

Not because of the FDA(partially) but because of the FTC everything a supplement company claims regarding their research has to be true. You cant just go on American airwaves and advertise to the people bullshit. Anything that people ingest into their bodies is subject to this same legislation. The FDA also regulates the research and even as a supplement has to be involved at the r&d level. so including a certain amount of participants, being double blinded, placebo controlled, etc are all parameters that must be met. Not being FDA approved (which if you are classified as a supplement, not a drug, you are automatically not eligible for the FDA approved label) is a hinderance in the process of selling to people because you cannot make any claims related to disease, if you are labeled as a supplement, even if you have research showing that it can help with certain diseases you cant talk about it. It costs about 100 million and takes about a decade to go from supplement classification to drug classification, the main difference there is the fees you pay to line the higher ups pockets.
The backlash against supplements right now is mostly due to the customer bases expectations. The key demo graphic for supplement takers is people over 65. People with dimensia and alzheimers who have no sense of logic or reason (this is also our key voting demographic, what does that say). People who for whatever reason expect to take weight loss supplements and expect to get results while still getting 3 plates at the bingo buffet or expect to take one bottle and lose 50 pounds when the instructions clearly say 90 days or whatever. the old fucks then get to finger pointing and bashing like they do over any issue (see politics) and now its an issue. No one ever in the history of ever that followed as supplement regimine as instructed has not gotten results. There are no miracle cures out there however.

I live in alternative medicine land (China). TCM might be the single greatest scam industry in the world; it quite literally negatively affects the lives of billions.

You might believe your own industry’s propaganda, but you won’t get scientifically literate people to fall for it. Find somewhere else to peddle your snake oil. I’m sure as hell not buying it.

Might try peddling your shit on a site for the elderly. They’re a lot easier to cheat.

tons of caffeine

ok the laws in china are obviously different than the ones here in the states

Theres propaganda and then theres the letter of the law

if it’s bullshit and people put it in their mouth and swallow it it cant go to market

Why don’t you eat fish instead of supplementing, is it really that hard to eat fish? A lot of people eat shit and take supplements on the side thinking it will solve everything, I don’t trust that shit honestly and I rather get my micronutrients from food.

Eating fish >taking fish oil it absorbs in the body better and there is more nutrients in the fish than there is in just the capsules. However a few things to consider, Salmon is 15 bucks a pound eating that in a weeks time is equivalent to taking fish oil for a week times 4 weeks that’s 60 bucks a month on average fish oil is typically 15 dollars for the whole month. Your also probably not gonna want to eat Salmon or Cod every day. Ironically though you did mention people eating crap in the case of fish oil a high fat meal actually helps you break down the capsules in a similar way to eating fish would.

Spoiler

I don’t work for a fish oil company I just a know a thing or 2 about a thing or 2 lol

Given how major the supplement industry is here in the USA, along with their pretty lax FDA regulation, not to mention constant attempts at undermining “invasive regulatory action” by the FDA to oversee the industry, I call bullshit.

Wouldn’t call it major but ok…

I mean the company I work for is number one in our field and were barely breaking Forbes top 500 growing companies in the US

Again Supplements are not drugs “alternative medicine” is illegal anytime you claim to cure or treat anything you need to have the drug label and FDA backing there

Being a Calcium supplement and saying Calcium is good for strong bones and teeth makes no kinds of claims and I can garauntee you any supplement company that’s made claims isn’t in business.

This is one of the reasons supplement companies are so on the ball about disease claims is because the FDA will not just take “regulatory action” they will completely shut your shit down and they will do it over petty shit. If paperwork isn’t marked using certain formats if they don’t like the process the company has for handling adverse effects claims or the way they get documented. The GMP’s get updated all the time too so u could be following the rules one day and not be within the tighter restrictions the next.

This is why I pretty much disregarded your opinion after your statement that the FDA regulations are lax seeing how the same GMP applies to pharmaceutical companies its just that the supplement companies cannot make disease claims this is literally the ONLY difference in how the FDA treats supplement companies vs Drug companies.

So

My sentiment exactly

ITT everyone on shoryuken.com is suddenly an armchair expert

j/k that’s always been the case

The only thing government regulation of alternative medicine accomplishes is forcing companies to figure out words to use in advertising and packaging that are too fuzzy to apply to regulation.

If that garbage was worth a damn then a doctor would have recommended it to you. The only home remedies I can respect are the ones that could be considered harmless and just personal preference in the first place. For instance I have a friend with a metal spine, doctor gave him medicinal pot in case of pain. With internet research, he figured out that changing his lifestyle (especially food) could reduce the pain as well. Turns out it works a bit (not perfectly), but before he knew that from experience he went in knowing full well that he could be spending money on something that might not work and he was A-Okay with that.

Most people buy supplements thinking it’s going “to just work and make everything better”. No a supplement isn’t going to kill you or fail to fix what it claims it fixes, who gives a crap? That’s not why it’s a stupid tax.

I did a months trial with Alpha Brain, which is quite popular in the eSports mainstream.

If you’re looking for supplements to check out, the more popular pro-gaming supplements are typically ones high in types of racetam (ie Piracetam), AC-11 and Alpha GPC.

Helps with focus overall, but wouldn’t say it’s significant enough to improve your gaming in the long term. Also it’s pretty expensive, caused nausia on an empty stomach and seemed to get less effective the more you got used to it, meaning more pills required. A good environment and a cup of coffee has the same effect for a lot less hassle.
Wrote a short blog about my findings here.

There is quite a large amount of difference between fish oil and a lot of traditional Chinese medicine.