Elaine Thompson / AP file

Seattle Seahawks quarterback Matt Hasselbeck doesn't mind being the latest face of the sometimes ugly sports supplement industry. The Seahawks Pro Bowl quarterback says that's because he is pitching the only supplements approved for player use through the NFL's heralded, two-year-old certification program.

updated 3:26 p.m. ET July 29, 2006

SEATTLE - Matt Hasselbeck doesn’t mind being the latest face of the sometimes ugly nutritional supplement industry.

Supplements have given that face — that of the Seattle Seahawks’ Super Bowl and Pro Bowl quarterback — an accessory: a smoke-spewing cannon for a throwing arm.

Well, a new advertising campaign has, anyway.

“I was lobbying for Superman, so I could look through walls — you know, the X-ray vision thing. I think that could serve me well against a pass rush this season,” a chuckling Hasselbeck said.

He was speaking recently by telephone from the Athletes’ Performance center within Arizona State’s athletic facilities. He was on a break from one of his final workouts before the defending NFC champions’ training camp opened this weekend in Cheney, Wash.

Swarms of elite athletes spend their offseasons training at the posh, Tempe, Ariz., retreat, founded in 1999 by workout guru Mark Verstegen. One of Verstegen’s corporate partners in Athletes’ Performance is Experimental and Applied Sciences, a Golden, Colo.-based supplement maker.

EAS, which Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories purchased for $320 million in 2004, has made Hasselbeck one of its latest NFL pitchmen. In print advertisements shot last month, it gave him the cartoon cannon arm. It also gives him enough protein powder mix and meal bars to feed the Seahawks’ offensive line.

It doesn’t bother the affable, well-liked quarterback that he is endorsing supplements from the same company that once had NFL bad-boy linebacker Bill Romanowski as a spokesman, among others.

The now-retired Romanowski, who rarely was interviewed without wearing EAS attire, said last year that he stayed one step ahead of the NFL’s drug policy during his 16-year career by taking supplements that the league had not yet banned.

It also doesn’t bother Hasselbeck that EAS once sold ephedra and androstenedione, now known to be a steroid precursor that Mark McGwire said he used while breaking baseball’s single-season home run record in 1998. EAS stopped making products with those ingredients well before it entered the NFL’s innovative, two-year old certification process for supplements to be approved for player use.

EAS remains the only supplement company to have the league’s certification, NFL counsel for labor relations Adolpho Birch confirmed last week.

That is why, despite these cynical times in which nearly every athletic feat comes with skepticism on how it may have been achieved, Hasselbeck doesn’t feel “dirty” about his association with supplements.

“Actually, it’s the opposite,” he said. “It is still a no-regulation industry. EAS is the only company will do what it took to get NFL approval for its products.”

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“It really wasn’t until the bad publicity that major league baseball was getting, with supplements and illegal substances in them, that I felt I really had to get educated on supplements,” he said.

In March, Hasselbeck’s promotional schedule took him to the “Arnold Classic,” former champion bodybuilder and current California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s annual fitness tournament in Columbus, Ohio.

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