Drinking Alcohol While on a Cycle

Steroids, Liver Toxicity and Oxidative Stress

By William Llewellyn

It is one of the most fundamental pieces of advice the steroid novice typically gets from those more familiar with these drugs: Don’t drink a lot of alcohol when you’re on a cycle. This little bit of counsel usually stems from the general understanding that steroids can be toxic to the liver. Amplifying this with alcohol just seems like poor judgment. Although liver toxicity tends to be specifically associated with c-17 alpha-alkylated oral substances, stressful because this organ is unable to break these synthetic agents down through normal metabolic pathways, the advice of not mixing steroids with booze remains very general in nature. Even if injectables are not thought of as outright liver toxic, they are still steroids, right? Surely they aren’t going to help things.

The decades-old advice endures; mixing gear with beer is just never a good thing. But is this belief absolutely correct? According to a study at Comenius University in Slovakia (Life Sciences, 74, 419-34), it may not be. Apparently, researchers there have found that certain anabolic steroids can actually protect the liver from alcohol-induced stress, an effect exactly opposite of what many of us would probably have expected.

Oxidative Stress

To understand this study, and the issue of alcohol’s liver-toxic effects, you need to first understand that the main issue at work here is oxidative stress. And at the center of oxidative stress are compounds referred to as free radicals. To give you a very simplistic view, you can look at free radicals as toxic waste products, which are formed during the metabolism of certain chemicals or compounds.

These compounds are not “normal” metabolites, however. Free radicals are formed when weak bonds are broken, leaving a molecule without an electron necessary for molecular integrity. This creates extremely unstable new compounds that must locate an electron fast in order to regain stability. To do so, the free radical will often attack the nearest cell, stealing an electron from one of its molecules. This triggers a chain reaction in which the new donor molecule then becomes unstable due to its electron loss, forcing it to then attack a neighboring molecule within the cell to steal an electron. Then this one attacks another, and so on, until the targeted cell ultimately dies. The body is comfortably equipped to deal with a certain amount of free radicals. However, when it gets to a point where the body’s ability to combat them is surpassed, significant damage may occur.

Vitamins C and E

Now, getting back to the study in question, we find that investigators looked at the effects of vitamins C and E on oxidative stress and hepatotoxicity (liver toxicity). It is not unusual that these vitamins were investigated, as they are understood to be, among other things, potent antioxidants. As antioxidants, they help protect bodily cells against the damaging effects of oxidation, such as that   brought about by excessive alcohol consumption. These vitamins specifically work to neutralize free radicals and they do this by acting as electron donors.

Unlike other biological donors, however, these compounds do not become unstable free radicals themselves when they lose an electron. They retain their full structural integrity, which immediately breaks the chain reaction of electron theft that often results in cell disruption. These vitamins are the body’s natural scavengers that let the body rid itself of free radicals that might otherwise produce cell or tissue damage. It was, therefore, little surprise that during the course of our study a combination of vitamin C and vitamin E effectively mitigated the liver-stressful effects that high doses of alcohol were able to produce. I guess this brings us to our first piece of tangible advice: Make sure you take your vitamins before your next weekend-long bender.

Vitamins T and N?

So, what does all this have to do with anabolic steroids? As it turns out, the investigators in Slovakia also wanted to see how testosterone and nandrolone would affect the oxidative stress presented by alcohol. To give you a closer look at what was going on during this study, researchers set up the following experimental protocol: 48 male Wistar rats were selected, then divided into six groups of eight. These groups included a control group (that took nothing), one that took alcohol alone, another that took testosterone alone, another alcohol plus testosterone, one with nandrolone and alcohol, and lastly, one with a combination of vitamin C, vitamin E and alcohol. The alcohol consumption was set at 5 grams per kilogram of weight, which in human figures equates to something like 17 ounces for a 220-pound bodybuilder (a whole heck of a lot of boozing, basically). This ran for a period of 27 days, after which the animals were sacrificed and measurements taken. Hey, at least they were rip roaring drunk when they were dispatched.

Anyway, after the animals were sacrificed, hepatic stress was examined. First, investigators looked closely at tissue triacylglycerol levels, which tend to build as stress is introduced to the liver. Next, histological examinations were conducted, which involved looking at the actual changes in the makeup of liver tissues under the microscope. The results obtained for each group were compared to the others, including those that were noted when the vitamin C/E combination was administered.

Like these vitamins, it turned out that both testosterone and nandrolone were able to protect the liver against these alcohol-induced impairments. If this were not startling enough, it was noted that testosterone and nandrolone actually did the job better. The study went on to also look at other areas of oxidative stress, including a couple of markers of kidney function (such as creatinine levels) and nervous system integrity. Testosterone and nandrolone again proved themselves useful. Researchers summed up the results of their study well, when noting the following:

“In our study, we have shown that [testosterone], [nandrolone] and vitamins C and E were able to partially protect the liver and cerebellar tissue from ethanol-induced injury mediated by the oxidative stress. In addition, [testosterone] prevented the loss of neurofilaments observed in the [ethanol only] group and decreased markers of carbonyl stress that may be of importance for the development of the late onset effects of chronic ethanol intake on central nervous and cardiovascular system. Further studies to prove and to analyze the possible mechanisms and relationships indicated by our results are needed.”

Figure1. *Level of triacylglycerols recovered from hepatic tissue, a marker for hepatic stress. Testosterone and Nandrolone were both more effective than the vitamin C/E regimen at mitigating the effects of alcohol (ethanol).

In Closing

So what does all this mean? Certainly, it does not suggest that there would be no consequences to drinking excessively during your next cycle. Even if testosterone or nandrolone were so effective they could completely mitigate any risks associated with this behavior (they wouldn’t), heavy drinking would still undoubtedly interfere with your training progress. Everyone can agree, I think, that hangovers are all hell on squat days.

The main reasons for presenting this data are therefore not practical in nature, but involve simply looking at anabolic steroids from yet another new perspective. As more and more studies are conducted on these agents, we continue to discover new benefits and potential uses in them. At the same time, the view of anabolic steroids is slowly evolving in the medical community. The more we investigate these hormones, the more difficult it becomes to summarily dismiss them. The old equation of testosterone + muscle = bad is being replaced by a much more complex one.

Hopefully, this will serve to further us to a time when these agents are much more widely used in medicine, for a variety of ailments not being addressed with them today. Perhaps, one day in the distant future testosterone will no longer be the evil muscle-building hormone. Maybe it will even be renamed. Something like “Antioxidant Vitamin T” sounds perfect, if you ask me.

William Llewellyn is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the use of performance-enhancing substances. He is the author of the bestselling anabolic steroid reference guide ANABOLICS and CEO of Molecular Nutrition. William is an accomplished researcher/developer in the field of anabolic substances, and is also a longtime advocate for harm reduction and legislative change. He built the website anabolic.org, an extensive online database of information on anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs.

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