The Clear Chemist

By Patrick Arnold

Welcome to this month’s edition of “The Clear Chemist.” In this issue, I go over how to make your own steroids in your kitchen, using nothing more than flour, rat poison, a car battery, and Play-Dough. Then I tell you where you can buy weapons-grade uranium at a surprisingly reasonable price— quality controversial craziness that you all have come to expect from the ‘Clear Chemist.’

Obviously I am kidding! (You reading this, Mr. Homeland Security man?) This month is interesting, but nothing I would classify as controversial. It’s probably a good idea for me to step away from the controversy for at least a bit, as I seem to have been getting way too much undeserved attention lately— and I don’t need to provoke any more. So go ahead and read on and I hope you enjoy ‘Clear Chemist Lite.’

Estrogen In Your Milk

You have probably heard all the buzz around about the possible dangers of environmental estrogens. The discussion usually revolves around stuff like phthalates and bisphenol A found in plastics and the dangers they pose when they get inadvertantly absorbed or ingested. But while estrogens from plastics may very well represent a concern (to infants especially), I think there is a much larger endocrinological threat out there that unfortunately is not discussed nearly as often.

Man has been drinking cow’s milk for thousands of years, and history has taught us that this consumption has pretty much been a healthy practice. However, this situation may recently have changed. The milk we are drinking today is quite a bit different than the milk we drank 100 or 500 years ago. In times past, cows were pasture-fed and the milk they generated was usually gathered after the cows gave birth. Today, however, cows live on feedlots where they are fed fattening corn and given hormones to increase milk yield. But more important to the issue at hand is the fact that they are kept pregnant most of the time, since that increases farmers’ productivity and cost-efficiency. As a result, much of the milk today originates from pregnant cows.

Cows continue to lactate throughout their pregnancy and during the second half of their pregnancy, in particular the levels of female hormones (estrogens and progesterone) in their milk rises considerably. The levels of these hormones and their biological potencies far exceed that of the weak xenobiotic estrogens in plastics and so pose a far greater risk to our health. In fact, many studies have been done, showing a strong correlation between milk intake and hormone-related diseases such as ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, breast cancer, testicular cancer, and prostate cancer.

Now you may be asking yourself, “Just how much female hormone is present in milk? Is it enough to provoke any significant adverse physiological effects in regular people?”

A study in the journal Pediatrics International actually looked into this— and what they found should raise some concern. The study had men and children drink a moderate amount of milk (600 mL). They then examined the change in hormone levels over the course of the next two hours. What they found in the men was a significant increase in estradiol and progesterone, coupled by a simultaneous drop in LH, FSH, and testosterone. The children showed increases in female hormones as well, as indicated by the observed urinary excretion of substantial quantities of estrogen and progesterone metabolites.

The study then went on to examine the effects of longer-term ingestion of milk in women. The women ingested 500 ml of milk every night for 21 days, starting on the first day of menstruation. What they found was that the timing of their ovulation was altered by the milk intake.

So apparently, drinking moderate amounts of milk may suppress testosterone in men, alter women’s menstrual cycles and fertility, and possibly even affect the sexual maturation of children. But what does this mean to us? Well, some factors have to be considered. Number one is that these female steroid hormones are primarily present in the fat portion of milk. That means whole milk, cream products, and cheese (many cheeses are high in fat) comprise the worst potential culprits. However, skim milk and low-fat cheese products might not be nearly so bad. So I guess the bottom line is that you may want to limit the amount of dairy you consume in your diet and/or opt for low-fat or fat-free varieties of dairy products.

Organic Nitrates as ‘NO supplements.’ Good Idea?

So-called ‘NO supplements’ have been the rage for quite a few years. Now, while I believe much of this popularity has more to do with a bunch of BS marketing and less to do with legitimate science, the fact remains that nitric oxide (NO) is known to be involved in many of the physiological responses to exercise, including stuff such as muscular vasorelaxation response and satellite cell activation.

Traditional approaches to enhancing nitric oxide responses mostly involved optimizing precursor availablity through the administration of amino acids such as arginine, ornithine, citrulline, and histidine. Certain other compounds and herbs have also been purported to enhance NO response through manipulating the activity of the activity of NO synthase, which is the enzyme through which NO is generated from amino acid precursors.

All these approaches basically are meant to make your body’s natural NO response more efficient. As such, they (allegedly) help increase NO levels at the parts of the body where your body feels it is needed, such as in muscles during strenuous exercise. But what if we could just give ‘straight NO’ to people as a supplement or drug? Well, you really can’t do this, since nitric oxide is a gas and a very reactive free radical. It’s not something you would ever want to smell, taste, ingest, or touch directly (trust me).

However, it is possible to deliver nitric oxide throughout the body through the use of NO pro-drugs called “organic nitrates”. Examples of organic nitrate drugs are nitroglycerin and isosorbide dinitrate. These are exploited in medicine because of their potent vasodilatory activities and so are useful for conditions involving poor circulation to the heart, such as in the treatment and prevention of angina pectoris. Nitroglycerin, for instance, is widely-used as a sublingual and when elderly people with weak hearts start getting chest pains, they pop one of these.

But would organic nitrates such as nitroglycerin offer any benefits to a bodybuilder or athlete? Well, before we answer that, let’s consider how they act in the body. These drugs pretty much raise NO levels indiscriminately throughout the body, and as such they cause some pretty nasty side effects, such as severe headache (due to cerebral vasodilation), as well as rapid heart rate, as your body tries to compensate to a rapid decrease in blood pressure. Nausea and diarrhea are not uncommon either.

The goal for a bodybuilder should be maximizing NO generation in peripheral muscle tissues, and so these systemic NO drugs don’t seem like they make a whole lot of sense. Still, at least one company has decided to release a NO pro-drug as a supplement. This supplement, according to the label, contains 10 mg of a compound they refer to as “2-(nitrooxy)ethyl 2-amino-3-methylbutanoate,” in the form of a sublingual tablet. According to the structure on the box of this supplement, the compound appears to be an ester of the amino acid leucine and a compound known as ethylene glycol mononitrate (EGMN).

So what would happen in the body if you ingested this stuff? Well, one thing that would happen very quickly would be the hydrolysis of the compound to free leucine and EGMN. Now a few milligrams of leucine is physiologically inconsequential— but what about this EGMN stuff? Well, it is an organic nitrate— so it does have the potential to cause systemic NO levels to rise, with the consequent hypotension and tachycardia etc., etc., that is known to happen.

Would an effective amount of this organic nitrate also be able to do much in the way of promoting a great pump? I don’t see it happening— but hey, anything is possible. Still, one concern is the end product that appears once EGMN breaks down in the body. That end product is ethylene glycol, otherwise known as radiator coolant. It is quite poisonous; however, the amounts that would show up in your body from taking this supplement probably would not exceed more than a few milligrams, so it’s probably below any acute toxic threshold. Even so, I really can’t imagine why on earth anyone would be so stupid as to design a supplement around ethylene glycol! At the very least, they could have made it a propylene glycol (a very closely-related, yet non-toxic compound) derivative or something. Oh well.

Anyway, the stuff some companies come up with to get a marketing edge in this industry gets crazier and crazier lately. It’s not a good trend at all in my opinion. It’s sort of like Sodom and Gomorrah— and we all know how that turned out.