NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENT TASTE CHALLENGE: POWER PUDDING
In part one of a series, Orson goes where few dare: the bargain aisle of your local GNC/Legal ‘roids shop, in a series that owes everything to the legendary “Steve, Don’t Eat It” segments from The Sneeze.
At no point in collegiate athletics has the influence of nutritional supplements been more pronounced: players are now bigger and more muscular now than they’ve ever been, and it ain’t a sudden quantum leap in human evolution driving the size revolution. Even the members of the lightest line in the Big 12 consumes 5,000 calories a day each just to maintain their size, more than twice the USDA recommended amount for the average, non-humongoid person. The old-school approach of stuffing players hasn’t disappeared completely, but has found a new variant as nutritionists follow the lead of professional weightlifters and triathletes in tinkering with protein shakes, powders, and whatever legal supplements they can get down athletes’ throats in order to engineer them into high-line, optimal performance athletes.
As we’re finding out one nasty scoop at a time, most of them taste like reconstituted monkey ass.
Item: Stallone High-Protein Pudding Don’t laugh. Okay, go ahead and laugh.
Flavor: Vanilla Crème Hard to see the accent egugrave without hearing Peanut telling Harvey Birdman, “The first one’s always free.”
Initial Impressions: Besides instantly recoiling at the idea of of power pudding concerned with calling itself vanilla “crème”? We would think the weightlifting set would want a title like “Gheorge Muresan’s Vanilla Thunder,” or “Vanilla Killah.” The pumped up GNC guy who sold it to us laughed when we brought the packet up here. “The chocolate flavor’s a lot more popular, actually,” he said, which we translated as “you’re getting ready to buy four cans of colon fluid porridge, jackoff.” He then took a gander at the date and informed us that since the cans were going to expire within the month, he’d give us all four for a dollar. Apparently, Stallone’s Vanilla Crème Pudding was difficult to even give away; we considered asking him to pay us to take it.
Undaunted, we took it home, examining the can in the car. It’s high protein, all right: 20 grams of protein, mostly isolated soy proteins for those afeared of getting too much estrogen in their system from raw soy. (These edamame, Ed…they just make me so…emotional…) (more…)
