Supplements in Esports

Nutrition always becomes a topic when you work in esports.

I think we have gotten to a point where there is an increased awareness that nutrition matters, both for performance and long-term health. But what I see in my work is that players are bombarded with supplement claims promising shortcuts to things like sharper focus, better recovery, improved sleep, and muscle gain. They're very interested in all of it, and at the same time very confused by it. Between podcasts, social media, and YouTube, the basic understanding of what actually makes up a healthy diet gets buried under the hype of whatever new supplement is currently trending.

Before going any further, I want to be very clear. I am not a nutritionist or an expert in this field. I'm a performance coach with a strong personal interest in nutrition due to my background in sports and a deep curiosity for training, healthy living, and self-improvement. What I'm sharing here is what I've taken away from a lot of reading, including books like Food Intelligence by Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall, and from years of watching how this plays out in pro teams. That's it, please take it for what it is.

I want to take some time to talk about supplements. I take them myself for training and general health, so this isn't a piece against using supplements. The point I want to make is smaller than that. When it comes to the regular supplements most of us reach for, like electrolytes, multivitamins, omega-3, magnesium, vitamin D, creatine, protein, or L-theanine, it's worth pausing before taking them blindly. In some cases what you actually need might be something as simple as eating fruit or berries on a regular basis. With that in mind, I want to share a few things I've stumbled upon through reading more on this. Most of it I didn't know myself, and I don't think most people think about it either, even when it comes to supplements generally considered safe and effective.

In my opinion, the most important thing for an esports player is eating real food. Whole foods, balanced meals, vegetables, fruit, and decent protein. Boring, slow, unflashy, but everything I've read and experienced so far backs this up. At the core of it, I think a player has to start with a healthy diet and stick to it, and no supplement routine can replace that.

The problem is that this is genuinely hard to sell. There are influencers out there hyping healthy nutrition, but far more selling supplements and their promised effects as facts. Pushing for mostly sticking to whole foods isn't a popular choice. It feels like there's always a pull toward doing something more to optimize, and in a culture where players are exposed to an abundance of information on the topic, the old-school approach of just eating real food often falls outside their comfort zone. The food doesn't always taste the way they want it to, and the kinds of meals that actually give long, sustainable energy aren't usually the ones they'd reach for on their own. On top of that, esports involves a lot of odd hours and travel for tournaments, which makes it easier to eat for comfort and lean on supplements to fill in the gaps. This is the reality we deal with as performance coaches, and finding a balance between healthier eating and not losing player buy-in is not an easy feat.

Do we actually know what we're taking, and do we even need it?

Electrolytes are a supplement I've seen used a lot in pro teams, often several times a day. I understand the drive to optimize, and staying hydrated is extremely important. What I wonder is whether electrolytes really give a player an edge over plain water. It's interesting that the same drive to chase that extra percentage doesn't always extend to the harder, slower work of seriously eating healthy. A lot of the players I've worked with don't actually know what electrolytes are and only have a vague sense of what they're supposed to do. Many think of them as a kind of energy drink, something that gives a boost in energy and focus.

There are situations in esports where electrolytes make sense, like illness that brings fluid loss, long flights, jetlag, or travelling to a country where the heat is well outside what your body is used to. What I'm less sure about is the multiple daily doses a healthy young player takes under regular conditions around matches, and why plain water wouldn't do the same job.

Something else I've noticed is how few players realise that eating healthy already covers most of what electrolytes are meant to provide. Sodium, potassium, magnesium and the rest are in everyday foods like vegetables, fruit, dairy, meat and fish. From what I've read, the body absorbs them just as well from food, and in some cases even better, because they come alongside other nutrients that help with absorption.

I'm not bringing electrolytes up to single them out. It's that I wonder if the same question applies to a lot of what gets taken in esports. Do players really know what they're taking, and is it actually relevant to what playing games asks of the body? I don't have a confident answer to either.

Supplements aren't the same as food

One of the more interesting things I came across when reading more about supplements is the idea of the food matrix. When you eat a piece of fruit or a real meal, the nutrients come embedded in fiber, fats, and other compounds that all affect how the nutrient is absorbed and what it actually does once it's in your body. Pull a nutrient out of that natural environment and put it in a pill, and you often don't get the same effect.

Something I hadn't really considered before is that just because a nutrient has health benefits when you get it from food, that doesn't mean it has the same benefits when you take it as a supplement. There are studies showing that for several common supplements, the effects in healthy people are quite limited, and in some cases have even been linked to increased health risks. Even with something as widespread as the multivitamin, one of the most-used supplements in the world, the picture is less clear than the marketing suggests. From what I understand, multivitamins don't really offer meaningful benefits to healthy people who already eat well. They can help fill specific gaps for someone whose diet is poor. But even in that case, a multivitamin isn't a real replacement for eating better.

The honest takeaway from what I've read is that the picture around supplements is far more nuanced than I had assumed. Some supplements show real health benefits. Some show benefits only in specific cases or at specific ages. And some don't really have a proven effect at all. I had taken for granted that most supplements do what they say they do, and I was firmly in the "it can't hurt to take one" camp. The reality seems to be more complicated than that. There's less hard evidence on how isolated nutrients actually behave in the body than I had assumed. And thinking about it through the lens of the food matrix, it makes a lot more sense to me now that nutrients work together, balance each other out, and have effects that are hard to recreate once you strip them out and turn them into a pill.

For me, all of this just brings me back to the same conclusion. Eating well and sticking to whole foods sits at the very root of getting long-term health benefits from nutrition.

Supplements aren't as regulated as you'd think

This was the part that was the biggest wake-up call for me about supplements, something I had no insight into before. In my head, I had always assumed supplements were regulated more or less like medicine. That before a product reached the shelves, it had to be tested and researched to prove it actually does what it claims. The reality is quite different. In most major markets, including the US and across the EU, supplements are classified as food rather than medicine.

Among Western markets, the US has the loosest oversight, with very little required of manufacturers before selling a product. Manufacturers themselves are responsible for ensuring their products are safe and that label claims are truthful, but no one is required to verify any of this before the product reaches the shelves. The EU is stricter on what can go in the bottle and what can be written on the label, but even there, supplements aren't subject to the rigorous placebo-controlled testing and research that medicines have to go through. What it comes down to is that there are a lot of supplements on the market with little real evidence that they work, and on the safety side, more is taken on trust than I had realized. A few countries like Canada and Australia hold supplements to a higher standard, but overall, the testing and oversight around what supplements actually do in your body is much looser than I had assumed.

Where I've landed for now

I don't think esports players are gullible, undisciplined, or any different from you or me when it comes to this topic. Supplement marketing is everywhere, offering everything from sharper focus, better overall health, improved sleep, quicker muscle gains, better skin, and a long list of other optimizations and shortcuts that may or may not work. The packaging and the marketing are far more attractive than the boring route of simply sticking to a healthy diet and slowly grinding your way toward your optimal physical and mental state.

The point here isn't to get people to stop taking supplements. I take them myself, and even with all the question marks today, I'm hopeful that the efficacy and safety of supplements will only improve with more research and time.

The way I see it, eating healthy is still the foundation. Supplements come after that, or alongside it to patch real gaps when they exist, but not instead of it. If you're going to use them, pause and ask yourself whether you actually need them. Go in with open eyes. Don't just trust the marketing.

That's what I wanted to lift and share, and I'll keep reading and adjusting as I go since this seems to be a topic that can shift quickly.
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