In a recent study completed and published in the Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise about steroid use, the study “attempted” to show that steroids kill you in no time flat. Wow, I find that extremely interesting for more reasons than one. Dying sooner than what exactly? Sooner than a street junkie or an alcoholic? A three-pack-a-day tobaccoholic? A grossly obese person? A front-line soldier?
To be honest, I have read studies that show that football players do die younger than the general population, but the culprit was not steroids, it was diet and bodyweight. Average football players, especially linemen, tend to be very large individuals who eat a great deal of food (you don’t get to weigh 300 pounds eating like a bird).
The trouble is, once many of these players retire they continue to eat as they did in their playing days. However, they’re no longer playing the game and burning up calories. Many stop exercise altogether, and so they add bodyfat like crazy. All that extra fat and bodyweight puts a strain on the heart and other internal organs.
If you think about it logically, you seldom see an obese person who lives to be 100. Maybe it’s nature’s way of protecting the species. Better to kill off the overweight glutton who eats enough food to support ten ordinary people, than let ten die from starvation.
Steroids can kill, of course, they can, but it takes a lot of abuse to do real harm. And as I’ve said before, steroids like nicotine are a long-term, slow killer. Just as a person may smoke three packs of cigarettes a day for 30 years before they get lung cancer, some bodybuilders can take huge amounts of steroids before it catches up with them.
In this sense, steroids are relatively safe, especially if you compare them to diuretics, speed, street narcotics, and other drugs that can kill in hours. If you took a whole bottle of D-bol you probably wouldn’t get much more than a slightly upset stomach. If you took a whole bottle of aspirin, potassium, or sleeping pills, you’d most likely die from an overdose
Just look at the facts. According to the US government, approximately 500,000 people a year die from nicotine-and alcohol-related diseases. Not more than a small handful (probably less than a dozen) die directly from anabolic steroids. Those who have died from steroids had really abused the stuff for a longtime. In Dr. Wright’s book on steroids he mentioned a case where a fellow took ten Anadrol 50 a day for ten years before he got liver cancer and died. That’s like someone drinking a couple of bottles of whiskey a day for ten years. You’re surprised they didn’t die sooner.
The human body is amazingly resilient. It can take use and abuse and punishment and neglect for amazingly long periods of time. Concentration camp survivors went through the kind of torture that boggles the mind for so long and they still live on (although emotionally scarred) years after their release.
Take the case of football star Lyle Alzado. He admitted he took steroids for 20 years nonstop before developing cancer. Even his cancer – a brain tumor – was supposedly caused by contaminated growth hormone, not steroids. GH has been implicated in other brain tumors, while steroids have not.
A lot depends on the kind of steroids taken, as well as the dose and duration. Some steroids are very harsh to the liver and internal organs: Anadrol 50, testosterone, Dianabol, Parabolan and Halotestin can be especially harsh. On the other hand, Winstrol, Anavar, Maxabolin, Primobolan and Deca-Durabolin are all relatively mild.
If you are taking whole bottles a day, even they can cause damage, but if you’re sensible and do moderate dosages and short cycles (6 to 12 weeks, with several months off between cycles), then the risk is likely to be minimal. I think people who drink moderately heavy are doing more damage to their liver, kidneys, and brain cells, than taking 10mg of Winstrol or Anavar a day. How do I know this? Look at the facts: Five hundred thousand deaths annually from drinking and smoking versus a few from steroids.
If one athlete dies from steroids, it’s front-page headlines blown all out of proportion. If 500,000 people die, we shrug it off, perhaps because it’s been happening for years. Philosophically, we think about drinking and smoking differently. We tend to say, “Did you hear about poor Charlie? He died last week.” But the poor bastard smoked three packs a day for 30 years, so what do you expect?
The average manor woman on the street thinks that steroids are more dangerous and addictive than crack. They have been so misinformed by the press and powers that be, they forget that these are not drugs made in someone’s bathtub. They have legitimate medical purposes. The ignorance of the general public and mainstream press is appalling.
Many women who would never take an anabolic steroid would be shocked if they learned that birth control pills are basically just steroids. Women give no thought to estrogen replacement – the public accepts that – but they think it strange that a man should take testosterone replacement to enhance the quality of his life, especially as he ages.
What a strange world. It’s thought perfectly okay to change your body through plastic surgery and liposuction, but wrong to change it through chemical enhancement and exercise. People who decry the use of dmgs in sports give no thought to taking painkillers when they have an injury, valium when they are stressed, cold medications when they have the flu, antibiotics when they have infections, anesthetics when they have surgery or go to the dentist, or smoke and drink without any thought to the repercussions. People are hypocrites and the louder they speak out about steroids, the bigger the hypocrite they tend to be.
The truth is, we don’t know as much about anabolic steroids as we should. After over 50 years of use by millions of athletes and non-athletes the world over we are still clueless. There have been thousands of studies done over the years, many proving that steroids did not work at all, that their effects were entirely due to a placebo effect (hence the warning on labels for years that steroids did not enhance athletic performance).
There have been studies with mice, rats, cats, dogs, pigs and horses. They megadose the animals nonstop for months on end until the poor critters are frill of tumors and their livers and kidneys are shot. Without exception the types of drugs and the doses given do not reflect those used by athletes, so results from these studies are questionable if not crazy. There is still much doubt as to what steroids can and cannot do.
Then you have the fear-mongers like Dr. Bob Goldman, the man who wrote Death in the Locker Room. Goldman made it sound as though everyone who took even ten mg of Dianabol for a month would be on his deathbed within weeks. Total nonsense. Personally, in all the years I’ve been involved in the sport, I haven’t known even one bodybuilder who died from steroids, and I know of only a couple of people whose deaths were attributed mainly to steroids.
I say attributed mainly to steroids because the individuals who died were also taking GH and other drugs commonly used by the more foolish bodybuilders who also use social drugs such as cocaine, pot, and alcohol. Nobody knows for sure the influence the other drugs had on their deaths.
I wish people would use their brains more. Use plain logic – good oh fashioned horse sense – instead of fallacious thinking. If 100,000 peo get cancer each year and steroids can cause cancer, you can’t automatically say that someone got cancer because he took steroids.
That’s a fallacy. He may have gotten cancer anyway. What about all the people who never smoked, thank, did social drugs or took anabolic steroids but did develop cancer It was in their systems (as it is in all our systems). They were time bombs waiting to go off. What I’m saying is that if some bodybuilder takes steroids and eventually develops cancer, he may have developed cancer anyway.
Today, the technology behind over the counter bodybuilding supplements has just about caught up to prescription anabolic steroids. Some companies are selling legal anabolic analogs (often called “Legal Steroids”) that produce amazing results according to internet reviews. Using anabolics to improve your physique is no different than making a choice to get breast augmentation or use botox. If you know the facts, it should be a matter of personal choice.
