Dr Tim Crowe

I'm surprising.

The answer is yes.

In terms of if you're not eating well to start with, or you're not eating a lot, some of these can be useful supplements and I'll use protein powders as a good example.

If you're training pretty hard, certainly protein requirements do go up, up to potentially 1.6 grams per kilogram body weight.

And only last month, there's this really good study done on with untrained athletes or beginner athletes who are vegetarian and not vegetarian.

And they put them on a higher protein diet.

And after 12 weeks, they all gained muscle mass.

But they found that those on the vegetarian diet, they needed to supplement more with soy protein to get to their protein goals because it was a little bit harder for them to get to that 1.6 grams per kilogram body weight from just food.

Certainly you can do it, but for vegetarians,

potentially the protein supplements, obviously soy-based, might be a bit of option.

Whereas if you're omnivore, you get loads of protein in meat, chicken, fish, eggs.

They're packed full of protein.

Whereas for vegetarian, you have to be a bit more selective.

But again, one of the best protein foods for vegetarians are going to be legumes.

So that's why soy protein is a popular protein supplement for that group.

So I would say they're not...

You shouldn't discount them.

They have a role to play.

And if they fit in with your training regime, if it makes it easier to consume that extra nutrition, well, that's a good thing.

Vitamin subscriptions, just no.