I work as an electron microscope service engineer, and I’ve been curious about what some of the stuff I put in my body looks like under higher magnification, so I took some supplements in to work to shoot some pics. I used an environmental SEM that let me image the supplements in a slight hydrous environment so the high voltage of the SEM would not cause massive charging of the powders. You can see that some powders still charged like the creatine and Power Drive, but overall the pics are decent.
I did the following:
Morton’s table salt - For size comparison, because we all can intuit what size table salt is
Creatine Monohydrate - Non-Biotest brand, I’m curious to know if there really is a size difference with “micronized” creatine. The creatine obvisouly grows in a sort of stratified plateau.
Power Drive - I wondered why it got all cakey. This did not look like what I thought it would AT ALL! Came out looking pretty sweet.
Benefiber - I put it in my shakes, and to be honest, I thought it would be much more fibrous than it was. It is still more angular than the creatine, but not terribly interesting.
Whey/Casein - This is a non-Biotest brand, and looked really globular, which I’m assuming means that at some point the liquid form is sort of aerosolized which lets the surface tension draw the protein into small balls.
Se7en - I cracked open a capsule, and imaged it still in its hydrated state. Compared to HOT-ROX Extreme, it was much more crystalline
HOT-ROX Extreme - Again imaged in the hydrated state. There wasn’t actually much to see here, but it was sort of interesting to compare it to the Se7en
[Edit: uploading is being a butt, so links are below]
Size comparison
higher mag Power Drive
higher mag creatine
HOT-ROX Extreme in its liquid form
