In an article written by HOWARD FENDRICH titled “Stricter oversight of dietary supplements closer”, it states that “Stricter government oversight of dietary supplements is moving closer thanks to an agreement among senators to include guidelines in a food safety bill.” For the full article use the following link (http://www.thetandd.com/articles/2010/03/10/sports/doc4b985abd09c9a923509714.txt).

I urge you to send an email to your representative telling them as responsible adults we should be allowed to decide what supplements we can and want to take (www.saveoursupplements.org). Let the FDA worry about drugs and approvals for those drugs. You never know when you might need longer eye lashes.

For those who dont have time to write out and email here is a sample (thanks to Matt Pearson of Recomp Performance Nutrition) that can be copied and pasted to be sent to your Senators.

I am writing to express my passionate objection and opposition to yet
another effort, this time by Senator McCain, to limit freedom and destroy
a healthy industry in this country. Senator McCain’s efforts to expand the
role of the FDA is counter to the wishes of the majority of the American
population that uses supplements, and is a blatant pandering to a special
interest (in most of the recent cases, the anti-doping agency.)

I am not a professional athlete, and certainly did not agree to the
limitations that they agreed to. It is up to them to police their own, and
not limit access to supplements by the general population.

The regulations, including GMP which will go into full effect in June of
this year, are already in place to properly control quality of supplements
in regards to contamination and proper labeling. We do not desire the same
or similar controls of the FDA, which has failed miserably to insure
quality in prescription medications, to prescriptions and refuse to allow
our freedoms to be quashed by overzealous legislation.

Leave us alone in this matter, and deal with things that are important -
such as the economy. Destroying another industry with over regulation and
angering even more of the population by attempting to grab even more power
is a foolish move.

I urge you to not only vote no on this iteration, but all future
iterations of the same ilk.

Thomas Jefferson once said,” Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. ["Notes on Virginia," 1784]”

And lets not forget “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”- Thomas Jefferson

Strangely the tax becomes effective during the Summer, beginning July 1, 2010.

Early reports and unconfirmed rumors have been circulating that International Federation of Bodybuilders and National Physique Committee athletes, as well as the entire “Jersey Shore” cast have begun organizing protests.

He will plead guilty to conspiracy to distribute steroids and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Under the terms of his plea agreement prosecutors will recommend the minimum sentence, estimated to be roughly 18 months.

So here is a congratulations to all those people who wrote their Senators to stop this Bill! But its not over yet, as Anthony Roberts blogged this morning, “There is, however, the potential for a compromise Bill with Hatch, so the supplement industry is not out of the woods yet. Not too long ago, then-Senator Biden managed to pass an anti-drug bill (called the Rave Act) by tagging it onto the Amber Alert laws (inexplicably).”

http://www.anthonyroberts.co.za/2010/03/dietary-supplement-safety-act-of-2010-s-3002-mccain-withdraws-support-for-his-own-bill/

Gaspari Nutrition has just shocked the nutritional supplement world with the announcement that they will be discontinuing two of their most popular products, Halodrol (Liquigels and MT) and Novedex XT. Halodrol was arguably their flagship product, and has been reformulated several times, from it’s original – and steroidal – incarnation, to the present day testosterone-boosting formula. Last year they made the decision to drop William Llewellyn’s Arachidonic Acid from the formula, citing inefficacy, as well as 6-OXO, citing numerous reasons.

Although these products were not among the ones recalled by Bodybuilding.com following the massive Mr. Olympia week raid by the FDA-OCI, BulkNutrition/MuscleMaster made the decision to issue their own recall of the products, shortly after they were also raided.  On December 27th, 2009,  The NY Post revealed that the NYPD had circulated a list of prohibited nutritional supplements. Both Halodrol and Novedex were on it. Then, on March 2nd, 2010, Fox News (which is owned by the same parent company as The NY Post), aired a segment about the prohibited nutritional supplements.

I’m not sure which of these events cased Gaspari Nutrition to drop both of these products from their line, but it’s probably a combination of all-of-the-above.

Below, you’ll find the company’s official position on the banning of their products by the NYPD, followed by the actual list of nutritional supplements that have been prohibited by the NYPD:

“All of Gaspari Nutrition’s products are labeled in accordance with federal and state law. Although warnings are optional, Gaspari Nutrition has voluntarily included warnings on its Halodrol and Novedex XT products to advise against taking these products if the consumer is subject to drug testing, because consuming the products may cause false positives… The warnings may be why the New York City Police Department has chosen to include Halodrol and Novedex XT on a list of products that employees should not consume. Gaspari Nutrition fully supports this NYPD initiative as it helps to further the message contained in the warnings on our products. Gaspari Nutrition’s products are manufactured in accordance with the high standards established for dietary supplement manufacturing, which include identification of ingredients used to make each product. Our products contain only safe and healthful dietary ingredients, and do not contain any banned or illegal ingredients. Gaspari Nutrition shares the NYPD’s concern for the welfare of the police force, the law enforcement community at large and is committed to selling the best quality safe and healthful dietary supplements to the public.”
–Rich Gaspari, President and Chief Executive Officer, Gaspari Nutrition

In a nutshell, PRP involves taking some of the patient’s blood and isolating the plasma, which is then re-injected site-specifically into the problem area. The idea is that the platelet-rich plasma encourages the release of cytokines that help spur on tissue healing, thus avoiding the need for surgery. Because the plasma has been isolated and deposited into one spot there is now obviously more plasma than would be there from normal blood concentrations. There are some more particulars about PRP that I won’t go into, mostly because I don’t fully understand it all yet, but also because it is irrelevant for the point of this article.

So far, it sounds like a world-beater, right? Not so fast there Broseph, new research coming out of Holland begs to differ. Granted, Ward and Woods both used PRP for knee ailments, and this study looks into PRP for Achilles tendon healing, but the research concludes that over 24-weeks PRP is no better than saline injections. 54 participants were split into PRP group and placebo group, and over different periods of time filled in the Victorian Institute of Sports Assessment-Achilles questionnaire (which can be found here: http://www.clinicalsportsmedicine.com/articles/FINALINPRESSVERSION.pdf). More research is needed.

This kinda throws a wrench in the works. But to be honest, if you are covered on your health insurance for PRP and have an existing tendon issue, it really can’t hurt to give it a try rather than going straight ahead with surgery that can take months to recover from, and sometimes requires physiotherapy.

Source: de Vos RJ, Weir A, van Schie HT, Bierma-Zeinstra SM, Verhaar JA, Weinans H, Tol JL. Platelet-rich plasma injection for chronic Achilles tendinopathy: a randomized controlled trial. JAMA. 2010 Jan 13;303(2):144-9.

Let me first state what vitamin D is not; a single compound. It is actually a group of several compounds. Due to medical breakthroughs occurring at various rates, vitamin D was grouped with the other vitamins as a single entity until new research shed light on other entities within the group and their roles in biochemistry. With new research coming out, people finally appear to be referring to the specific subtypes in articles and journals, much like they are specific with which B-vitamin they are referring to when discussing them. And the type of vitamin D people seem to be most interested in lately is vitamin D3, hereby known throughout this article as the incredibly complex ‘D3’.

Believe it or not, but D3 is actually a hormone precursor, or ‘prohormone’. It is synthesized in the skin when ultraviolet light from the sun reacts with a type of cholesterol in the skin. D3 is then passed to the liver where it is converted to calcidiol, and this is in turn passed to the kidney to become calcitriol, the active form in the body. The more astute of you will have realized the importance of the sun for this to occur, and will be pondering the impact of the darker winter months that so many of us have to live through. It’s true that the average Joe notes a decline in vitamin D over winter. Some sharp thinkers may be thinking that a few blasts in the tanning salon should make up for it, but I am afraid that may not be the case. The type of UV light required for the conversion to D3 in the skin is UVB while tanning beds typically emit 95% UVA and only 5% UVB. We can get some through food sources, but the foods that actually contain vitamin D such as oily fish, meat and eggs are not exactly exploding at the seams with the stuff, so supplementation may be a good idea. But why, I hear you cry.

Vitamin D is associated with a magnitude of benefits including fat loss, insulin sensitivity, improved blood pressure, stronger immune response and a decrease in heart disease. These should be enough to warrant ensuring you have sufficient intake, but the effect I am most interested in for this article is the potential impact vitamin D levels can have on testosterone. This stems from recent research coming out of Austria looking at any correlation between levels of vitamin D and androgens in order to assess any seasonal variation between the two. What they found was that men with sufficient vitamin D were found to have the highest testosterone and lowest sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG). SHBG is a protein that renders androgens inactive when bound. The researchers also found that levels peaked in August, during the height of the summer for the Northern hemisphere. So if you live in the north and experience months of low sunlight, taking some D3 may be a good idea, even if just for the winter. There are even some parties who claim that D3 has alleviated their seasonal-affecting disorder (S.A.D. or “winter blues” as it is colloquially known) but medical research is somewhat conflicting.

So fundamentally, I support the use of D3 supplementation to ensure adequate amounts to ensure there is no decline in testosterone during sunless-months. But some of the news articles and blogs I read stemming from this research lead to the conclusion that sunlight can boost testosterone, leading to an increase in libido. This is a somewhat narrow-minded conclusion as there are so many more players in the “libidostat”, a word I just made up. However there is definitely something from sunshine that raises libido. And I’m not just talking about men either – women tend to become more forward and wear more revealing clothes in the summer and it’s not just because it is warmer. This is also connected to D3, because the skin pigment Melanin is a filter that controls how much UVB gets through the skin to affect D3 synthesis. Sunlight appears to have a positive effect on melanin by stimulating its release from melanocytes which increases sexual arousal, and also strangely effects appetite. Some pharmaceutical companies have taken advantage of this which you may have heard of under the name “Melanotan”. While Melanotan is used for increasing a person’s tan, it was born from research looking into a solution for erectile dysfunction under the brand name Bremelanotide (which never made it to market due to health concerns).

That’s all for now, but I promise to revisit this topic again in the future with more specific detail into some of the benefits of D3.

Source: Wehr E, Pilz S, Boehm BO, März W, Obermayer-Pietsch B. Association of vitamin D status with serum androgen levels in men. Clin Endocrinol (Oxf). 2009 Dec 29.

Firstly, some companies have been known to put yohimbine in their products that may not necessarily be directed towards fat loss. This is done purely so the user “feels” it and thinks it is working. I’m sure a lot of brosephs in the US associate growth with anxiety and a lovely tight feeling in their chests. What I dislike about this is when it is disguised either by a synonym, or tucked away in a long proprietary blend list.

Secondly, and finally, I must mention that the guy with intractable priapism was not given a pill to take in order to fix the problem. He had to go into the operating room and have his “member” drained of blood. I am wincing as I type this.

Not laughing now, are we?

Source: Myers A, Barrueto F Jr. Refractory priapism associated with ingestion of yohimbe extract. J Med Toxicol. 2009 Dec;5(4):223-5.

Growth hormone has long thought to be untraceable due to its incredibly short half-life (approx 25 minutes). This sort of ignorance is going to get a lot of professional athletes into trouble, and I’ll admit I had no idea this was possible until yesterday. Then again, I don’t follow drug testing on a daily basis, nor am I a professional drug-using athlete who needs to be on top of this kind of information. All the news articles discussing the rugby star’s ban mentioned blood analysis, but gave no details of the testing procedure so I had to delve a little bit deeper. Believe it or not, there are actually two distinct methods for testing, developed by two independent teams. The first test is called the “isoform approach”, which in the words of the researchers, “directly analyzes the spectrum of molecular isoforms in circulation: the pituitary gland secretes a spectrum of homo- and heterodimers and - multimers of a variable spectrum of hGH isoforms, whereas rhGH consists of the monomeric 22,000 Da isoform only.” In Layman’s, this means that synthetic hGH can differ slightly from the hGH made by your pituitary. An isoform just means a different type of the same protein, kind of like how you can have a red chair and a blue chair, but they are both chairs. This test was developed in Berlin, Germany led by Professor Christian Strasburger and appears to be the test used to catch out Terry Newton. Unfortunately this test only works for a few days after hGH use.

The second test is known as the “marker approach” which was developed at Southampton University in England led by Professor Peter Sonksen. It involves looking at GH-dependant biomarkers IGF-I and type 3 procollagen (P-III-P) which appear to vary differently from endogenous and exogenous GH. This test claims to be able to test up to 14 days after use, which is quite incredible for a drug once thought to be impossible to detect. The World Anti-Doping-Agency (WADA) is looking to combine these testing methods into one robust testing procedure.

Yesterday I questioned when the MLB and NFL would consider implementing this testing. As it turns out, the minor leagues are lining up to start testing and there are calls for the NFL to include it also. Links to articles on both stories can be found beneath the sources at the bottom of the page.

Sources:
Bidlingmaier M, Strasburger CJ. Growth hormone. Handb Exp Pharmacol. 2010;(195):187-200.

Erotokritou-Mulligan I, Eryl Bassett E, Cowan D, Bartlett C, Milward P, Sartorio A, Sönksen PH, Holt RI. The use of growth hormone (GH)-dependent markers in the detection of GH abuse in sport: Physiological intra-individual variation of IGF-I, type 3 pro-collagen (P-III-P) and the GH-2000 detection score. Clin Endocrinol (Oxf). 2009 Jul 24.

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20100224&content_id=8128628&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb

http://views.washingtonpost.com/theleague/nflnewsfeed/2010/02/nfl-favors-blood-testing-players-for-hgh.html?referrer=emaillink

“In a major breakthrough in the fight against doping, a British rugby league player has become the first athlete to be suspended for using human growth hormone.

Terry Newton admitted taking the substance in a statement released by his attorneys on Friday. The United Kingdom Anti-Doping authority announced a two-year ban on Monday after Newton was fired by his club, Wakefield.

“It’s the first time and very significant,” WADA director general David Howman said. “It shows the people who say that HGH cannot be detected that it can. The sports people who said it can’t be detected are fooling themselves.”

For more on this article:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=4938135&campaign=rss&source=ESPNHeadlines