Nutritional Supplements: Men Vs. Women

The local health food store, nutrition shops in the mall, fitness magazines, TV commercials, infomercials – wherever you look, you won't have missed the fact that nutritional supplements are absolutely everywhere. The supplement industry is worth a lot of money. It’s reported that the global supplement industry is worth not far short of 70 billion dollars, so supplements are pretty big business.

Their secret lies in convincing you that you absolutely need these supplements. While it's true that supplements can be helpful, do men and women really need to take different ones? Or is it all marketing?

The Marketing Behind Male and Female Supplements

Supplements are actively marketed as miracle cures. No matter what your ailment, be it health-related such as poor skin, sleep and stress issues or feeling tired and lethargic, or simply wanting to improve your performance in the gym and on the sports field, there’s a supplement for it.

Sports supplements tend to be the most heavily marketed and promoted, purely for the reason that people want to look awesome. Forget going to the gym and eating healthily, if a supplement company can convince people that their product will get them the desired results without any of the hard work, they’ll do their utmost to get their ad team on the case, put the product on the shelves, and into your pocket.

Unfortunately, more often than not, we’re suckers for fancy marketing

The trend in recent years has definitely swung towards the way of the gender specific marketing of nutritional supplements. You’ll tend to find two categories of supplements.

The first generally come in huge black tubs with a picture on the front of a ripped bodybuilder or a muscled hunk in shorts with a beach babe on his arm. The product name contains words like “anabolic”, “mega”, "bulk", “xxx formula”, “wrath” or “rage” and is often accompanied by a huge number that doesn’t mean anything. As you’d expect, these supplements are marketed at men who are desperate to get big and lean — fast.

On the other hand, you’ve got the supplements aimed at the female market. These will be sold in smaller tubs, or sleek, shiny bags often with a pastel color tint. The picture will be a pretty and very slim woman – not too muscley, just with good muscle tone and definition, elegantly sipping a shake from a tall glass. Words such as “diet” “lean” “vixen” or claims like “specifically designed for women” will adorn the label.

Next time you get the chance, pick up a container of basic whey protein powder. Look at the male version with the bodybuilder on the front. It will probably have claims on the bottle to do with increasing the rate of protein synthesis or how much muscle you can gain by adding it to your diet and include details of the ingredients like BCAAs, a percentage of protein and if it’s got any extra creatine, glutamine or leucine added.

Then get a women-specific protein powder. The packaging and pictures will be different for a start and the claims will probably involve a metabolism boosting property as well as fat loss and definition. The advertised ingredients will boast about the minimal carbohydrate and fat content, perhaps some added CLA or another fat burning ingredient.

But once you get down to it and examine the exact ingredients you’ll see something surprising – they will be 99% the same. Protein, carb and fat content, added ingredients and everything else will be so similar it won’t make a jot of difference.

The only variable between the two is the way they’re marketed. This certainly isn’t illegal, or even particularly underhand, but it’s very clever and an excellent way of getting you to part with more of your hard earned money.

With this being the case, it’s safe to assume that there are really very few differences between male or female specific supplements.

However, there are a few considerations regarding gender you do need to address when choosing nutritional supplements.