tymon_tm wrote:i'd even go that far to claim this food engineering thing has greater impact on human health than taking PEDs or other forms of doping.
allmost everything we eat is somewhat artificial. maybe some of you are familiar with a French film L'Aile ou la Cuisse with Louise de Funes. it's a comedy about a gastronomy expert that faces the company producing 'plastic' food. turns out, some 30 years after the movie was made, we're not that far from said company's production methods. as i've read and heard, in some cases, especially involving high temperatures, the food structure turns into an uneatable form of plastic, that our body doesn't digest. think of french fries for example. we eat that stuff every single day, while athletes take doping for like a decade? we talk about negative impact of doping over a plate of fake meat and laboratory- grown potatos...
While you might be correct, your point is totally irrelevant to the Armstong situation.
The point is that there have to be rules in sport, otherwise the very concept of sport is uttterly meaningless. To break those rules in a way that gives you a significant advantage undermines the principle of fair competition, for which the line has to be drawn somewhere, even if we all know it's an imperfect world.