This article is the introduction to a series of articles dealing with steroidal substances used as nutritional supplements. These substances have growth-promoting (“anabolic”) or other interesting effects in the human body. Whether these effects are considered desirable or undesirable depends on one’s viewpoint. The substances we plan to discuss in this series include:
A vast amount of false information has been circulated about anabolic substances — most of it negative and designed to justify legislative actions. But some of it is positive and generated by overly enthusiastic users and sellers of these substances. Achieving an informed and unbiased viewpoint requires reliable data from medical research, but government agencies have deliberately obstructed most such research. The articles in this series are short summaries of what is actually known.
What is a “steroid”
Any substance whose molecular structure contains the four-ring framework of carbon atoms shown in Figure 1 is called a “steroid”.
Steroids found in living organisms include cholesterol, androgens, estrogens, progestins, corticoids, insect metamorphic hormones, plant steroids such as digitalis, and many other categories.
A brief history of steroids
Steroids have been a part of the biochemistry of life for at least 2 billion years. The earliest ‘true’ cells (as distinguished from bacterial cells) are thought to have used the steroid ‘cholesterol’ as a component of their cell membranes.
The next billion years saw the evolution of biochemical pathways by which cholesterol could be converted into other steroid molecules. In animal cells the pathway that developed allowed cholesterol to be converted in several steps into estradiol. During this period an estradiol receptor also evolved — a protein molecule which could bind to estradiol and regulate certain genes. The presence or absence of estradiol could then be used to control the turning on or off of these genes.
By the time that proto-vertebrates appeared (about half a billion years ago), variants of the estradiol receptor had evolved: a progesterone receptor and a corticoid receptor. With time, all three of these developed variants of their own, giving rise to the wide variety of steroid receptor types we see today: androgen receptors, estrogen receptors, glucocorticoid receptors, etc. Each type of receptor binds to certain steroids and not to others, and regulates certain genes and not others. The result is a very complex and useful system of gene regulation.
Fungi, which are closely related to animals, also use steroids as gene regulators. Plants make only a limited use of steroids. And there are no steroids at all in most bacteria.
Steroid discovery and development
It has been known for many thousands of years that the castration of male animals changes their behavior dramatically. It has also been known since ancient times that an effective elixir can be made from dried urine residues — which contain a variety of steroids, including some that are anabolic. These two techniques — testosterone deprivation and steroid supplementation — were the beginning of a long history of manipulating steroid concentrations in the body.
The scientific discovery and study of steroids dates from around the beginning of the 19th Century with chemical investigations of cholesterol and biological experiments with testicular tissue. By 1889 Charles Eduard Brown-Séquard had discovered that testicular extracts, if taken by injection, resulted in rejuvenated physical and mental abilities. But wasn’t until 1935 that the chemical testosterone was actually isolated and identified. Other steroids, such as estrone, were being discovered in urine just prior to 1930.
The molecular structure of the basic steroidal framework was worked out (for cholesterol) in 1932. The first chemical syntheses of steroidal substances were accomplished in the 1940s, and in the 1950s certain steroids began to be manufactured on a large scale for birth-control pills.
According to a widely circulated story, testosterone supplementation was first used on a large scale during World War II when the German military found that it could improve soldiers’ combat performance by giving them injections of testosterone. Another popular bit of lore is that German and Russian athletes began using testosterone supplements during the late 1940s, and did so well in the 1952 Olympics that the rest of the athletic world took notice. Drug companies also took notice, and a search began for analogous compounds that would have the anabolic properties of testosterone but without such side effects as acne, hair growth alterations, testicular atrophy, etc. Other types of steroids — for birth control and for various medical conditions — were also looked for. Thousands of new steroids were synthesized and tested. From this effort came dozens of useful anabolic steroids, estrogens, progestins, and corticoids.
Steroid usage and impact
Anabolic steroids have had a major impact in sports, beginning with weightlifting and wrestling in the 1950s and expanding by the 1980s into every sport in which physical strength plays a role. The athletes and their sports have greatly benefited from this new technology.
Things went somewhat awry, however, in the field of bodybuilding — where muscle size is all-important and steroid dosages therefore became extreme. A few well-publicized cases of medical problems attributed (often wrongly) to excessive steroid usage provided a pretext for action by anti-drug crusaders, who mounted a campaign to discredit anabolic steroids and those who use them. The campaign, which was based on ridiculous lies and exaggerations, was laughed at by athletes, but it succeeded in convincing a naive public and spineless legislators that people should be denied legal access to these marvellous new compounds. So, in 1990 the “Anabolic Steroid Control Act” was passed, with predictable results: the development of a huge black market; products of uncertain quality; a need for secrecy instead of openness; expensive, destructive court proceedings and incarcerations; increased hostility toward government; further growth of the law enforcement industry; a climate of intimidation and censorship in medicine.
Other steroids (such as estrogens, progestins, and corticoids) have remained largely under the control of the medical profession, and have also had tremendous positive impacts on the well-being of individuals and society. These compounds have given rise to birth control pills, hormone replacement therapy, treatments for skin ailments, inflammatory diseases, and asthma, and much else. Had these substances been more freely available — as nutritional supplements requiring no prescription — we might have seen even greater benefits, since far more experimentation would have taken place.
The anti-drug movement, however, has different ideas. Ever on the look-out for opportunities to expand its crusade, it has recently begun to target the estrogens and progestins — on the pretext that they increase breast cancer risks. Once again these crusaders are mounting a campaign based on distortion and on a contempt for personal freedom. Whether they will someday manage to get laws passed against possession of estrogenic and progestogenic hormones remains to be seen.
The immediate battlefront between the anti-drug movement and freedom-of-access advocates lies in the area of athletic performance enhancers — including steroidal prohormones such as DHEA, energy regulators such as creatine, and new anabolic steroids that weren’t covered by previous legislation. This time the anti-drug crusaders have enlisted the support of lack-witted sports columnists in addition to the usual gaggle of naive parents, and headline-hungry politicians. Other groups aboard this latest anti-drug bandwagon are those who stand to profit from the illegalization of these substances: the law enforcement industry and physicians’ groups.
The future
In the short term, we should expect increasing government obstruction of people’s access to steroidal supplements and other athletic enhancers. As effective mental enhancers are developed in the next few years, we can expect similar obstruction of our access to these, although some of them will become available as very expensive prescription drugs. These conditions will create great opportunities for black marketeers, but will create risks of buying low-quality or counterfeit products.
Biomedical advances will continue to reveal ever more powerful substances for physical and mental enhancement — some of them steroidal in nature. In a society where most people think clearly and mass hysterias are rare, the availability of these enhancers would be hailed as a triumph of 21st Century science and technology, and people’s right to use them would be taken for granted. Since we don’t live in such a society, we may see instead an expansion of the anti-drug movement to include these enhancers as targets for illegalization. New steroidal enhancers will probably not be developed at all because of legal obstacles already in place. Non-steroidal enhancers — such as memory boosters, libido regulators, bodyfat controllers, and rejuvenators — may be obstructed by the growing anti-tech movement which has adopted a pseudo-religious opposition toward nearly all new technology, especially that which involves the human body.
But public attitudes change with the passing of generations, and change in response to unpredictable events and discoveries. During the coming decades, while biomedicine is finding powerful new substances for physical and mental enhancement, today’s 30-to-60-year-olds will be losing their cultural influence — their totalitarian mindset may be rejected by their successors who, one hopes, will have adopted a more libertarian outlook. And the anti-tech movement may disintegrate as the negative consequences of its policies become more and more obvious.
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