Hypocrite personal trainer jailed for selling illegal supplements

An Australian personal trainer has been sentenced to two years jail for selling “supplements” (known as SARMs) illegally. And the funny thing is, he has a history of telling people they don’t need supplements, if only they eat and train as he tells them to!

Here at Critical Fitness, we love to encourage personal trainers to stay in their lane. Our lane does not include prescribing or selling supplements. But too many bad trainers stray from this lane without consequence, if they’re lucky enough to not hurt their client. So I’ll admit to some getting some satisfaction out of this news.

The background to this story is fascinating, so let’s go back a few years…

Former soldiers become personal trainers and set up a gym.

In 2013, Sydney community newspaper The Leader reported the following:

A GROUP of Australian Army commandos from the war in Afghanistan claim footballers, especially league players, can escape the dangers of drugs in sport by replacing most of their supplements with paleolithic nutrition.

You’ll remember that in 2013 the Paleo diet was all the rage, notably promoted in Australia by “Paleo” Pete Evan (before he turned into a conspiracy theorist and neo-Nazi).

Their own less than wholesome experiences in Afghanistan convinced the men to study a healthier lifestyle for themselves once their service time was up. They set up a gym, to train ordinary people “commando fashion” — and embraced a naturally nutritious diet.

Helping people exercise and eat well has nothing to do with being a commando, but it doesn’t matter. They are using their background as a marketing gimmick. But they’re motivated to help people eat better and exercise, so what could go wrong?

“The most important thing to remember regarding sports nutrition is that our human DNA has only changed 0.02 per cent in the last 2.5 million years,” [Ryan] McTeigue said after supervising another tough workout.

“Therefore we still have ancient bodies, which have not adapted to foods or supplements that are made inside a lab.”

Oh dear.

Are this personal trainer’s opinions on evolution correct?

This may make intuitive sense to some readers. And to be fair to McTeigue, this is probably a throwaway line he heard from someone else. I doubt he’s fact checked this statement.

This is the whole premise of the Paleo diet. Proponents claim the environment we evolved in is very different to the modern urban environment. So, by eating in a way that is consistent with how our ancient ancestors ate, we will be healthier.

Unfortunately, much of this is nonsense.

When we don’t have expert knowledge in a topic, we risk falling for something that sounds intuitively true. We don’t have the expertise to identify what could be wrong with what we are told. We won’t even know we are making a mistake… and this is where McTeigue is in this moment that was unfortunately captured by the journalist.

Personal trainer has some thoughts on chemicals too.

Chemicals sounds scary, have complicated names, are developed in labs, and are obviously terrible for us. The fewer chemicals we have in our diets, the better, right? McTeigue thinks so:

This former commando believes, like many others, that there is enough evidence to show that our bodies don’t recognise the chemicals that are in most supplements. “The body will create body fat to store the chemicals, in order to keep them away from the blood and vital organs,” he said.

I’d love to know what “evidence” he has reviewed. He’s made some major mistakes here, so it’s probably not the same evidence I’ve reviewed for this article. It’s true that body fat will store some “chemicals” – an example being fat-soluble vitamins. But I’m not clear what chemicals he thinks will lead to the creation of body fat.

And some pollutants accumulate in our body fat and may disrupt fat metabolism. But we don’t create body fat to store chemicals.

We know that body fat accumulates in response to our energy balance. While the factors that influence this energy balance are many and complex, weight gain and weight loss is the result of this energy balance changing.

“There’s sometimes 90,000 chemicals in people’s diets. So we’ve moved completely into nutrition. You just don’t need supplements, and you can’t count on them working for you,” McTeigue said.

Should we try to reduce the number of chemicals we are exposed to?

Large numbers sure sound scary, but everything is a chemical. Every cell in your body is made of chemicals. Every gram for food and drink that passes your lips is a chemical. You are exposed to thousands of chemicals every day, some of them quite important to your survival!

Also, take note of McTeigue saying supplements don’t work. He’s a fan of broad, blanket statements lacking nuance, but this is probably the closest he’s come to being right so far. Like a broken clock, sometimes you get lucky.

Incidentally, I tried to look up McTeigue’s qualifications and found nothing. I’m sure he’s qualified to work as a personal trainer, but I doubt that he has any relevant expertise in evolutionary biology, or the products he went on to sell.

You’re just a personal trainer too, who cares what you think?

I agree! While I have qualifications in exercise physiology and the knowledge of personal trainers, no one cares what I think about human evolution. To get an expert opinion, we need to ask an evolutionary biologist. So, I did!

According to Dr. Renee Catullo, from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Western Australia, McTeigue is wrong about almost everything.

Modern humans arose less than 500 000 years ago, and modern humans only left Africa 60-100 000 years ago. Most of the variation we see in humans came about since then. And that 0.02% thing is completely made up. There has been extensive evolution even since modern humans left Africa. Every species is undergoing evolution, all the time.

This is a major flaw with the Paleo diet in general. We can’t just pick a point in time and claim that eating like we did then is healthier, as we are better evolved for that diet. Humans have evolved since this point. And we continue to evolve today.

Take lactose tolerance as an example. While dairy is excluded by the Paleo diet, humans evolved the ability to digest lactose in adults no more than 10 000 years ago. The domestication of dairy animals first occurred about 9 000 years ago, and the ability to digest lactose may have been a survival advantage in times of scarcity.

Dr. Catullo also identified that the amount DNA has changed is irrelevant, pointing out that human DNA is largely identical to some modern primates. More important is which changes occur, and what the impact of those changes are.

The scope of practice of personal trainers.

This is a classic example of why trainers should limit their statements to the areas of their qualification. Personal trainers are qualified to give basic healthy eating advice within nationally endorsed guidelines. Not provide advice on what humans ate thousands of years ago.

It sounds mostly harmless so far. But think about where this could lead. If someone, after listening to McTeigue, decides that food = good, and chemicals = bad, it’s a short, seductive step to medicine = chemicals, therefore medicine = bad.

This person has then been influenced someone to stop listening to medical advice. Make no mistake, trainers can cause real harm with careless statements.

This trainer doesn’t sound like he wants to sell supplements!

Not long after this it seems that McTeigue had a change of heart. He decided that some chemicals, were in fact good. Then he decided to start selling them.
In 2017 he registered a company called Elite SARMs. This company was established so a personal trainer could sell a range of supplements. Supplements full of chemicals, no less! These chemicals included selective androgen receptor modulators (SARMs).

Androgens are male sex hormones, such as testosterone, and androgen receptors are found in some tissues in the body. When an androgen molecule binds to a receptor, this receptor moves into the nucleus of its cell. Through a mechanism that is not yet clear it then promotes secondary sexual characteristics, including increased muscle mass and strength.

Steroids act by also binding to these receptors (and increase their number). They allow us to train harder, and recover faster, though not without risk.

Elite SARMs suggest that their product prioritise muscle and skeletal tissue, and do not have an impact on other tissues as steroids do. They also claim not to cause the side effects associated with steroids.

SARMs sound too good to be true.

They sure do. Don’t forget, the person making the claim is responsible for proving the claim. And a claim like “all the benefits, with none of the risk!” is a very bold claim. We would need very good evidence to support it.

But so far, the evidence just doesn’t stack up. The evidence of the effectiveness of SARMs is patchy, and much of the evidence on safety is in animal, not human, trials. But to suggest that these drugs carry no risk at all is naive.

Regardless of if they are safe and effective, they are illegal to sell in Australia without a prescription. In 2018 after receiving a tip-off, the Therapeutic Goods Administration started investigating Elite SARMs.

Currently the Elite SARMs website carefully avoids mention of Australia, though they still supply these products to consumers around the world. They claim to sell these products for research purposes. But it looks an awful lot like an online supplement store to me.

And there are no links to research, but plenty of anecdotes about improved size and strength, reduced body fat, etc. Clearly, they are selling to the public.

What happened to McTeigue?

After some time overseas McTeigue returned to Australia in 2023. He was promptly arrested, and was sentenced to two years prison in 2024, with that sentence suspended.

He went from “no one needs supplements”, to “buy my supplement, which is definitely not a steroid, but just as good” in just a few short years. I’m all for people evolving* and changing their minds in the face of new information. But he obviously doesn’t have the ability to differentiate between reliable information, and nonsense. And when combined with a financial incentive to believe said nonsense, he ends up with a criminal record.

Even the experts don’t know enough to say clearly that these drugs are safe and effective. If they don’t know, this clown certainly doesn’t.

*see what I did there?

Note: the featured image at the top of the page is for illustration only. It does not represent the trainer in question.