Potential propensity of traditional herbal materials ingested by collegiate athletes in South China for their consuming health care

Abstract

In south China, traditional herbal medicines have been widely used as functional foods or dietary supplements for daily health care. Many plant-derived chemical substances with biological activity are inadvertently ingested by collegiate athletes daily through cantonstyle herbal tea or herbal slow-cooked soup. In the view of the complexity of herbal ingredients, it is still no full survey reported for the sports risk of plant-derived sports doping. This research is firstly a descriptive statistical analysis. Collegiate athletes with different socio-economic characteristics from medical colleges in 3 different regions in China participated in the questionnaire survey. Three survey forms, including the oral interview, email inquiry, handing out and recovering the questionnaires in live, were developed and performed by researchers. It was first found that collegiate athletes resorted to some traditional herbal materials to protect their health care that there were regional differences (P