Tomorrowland (23 page)

A blizzard of other scientists have since built upon this work, leading to an ever-increasing number of big ideas about the causes of aging, with free radicals among them. Another notion is that the accumulation of excess glucose in our tissues screws up the cells’ ability to function normally. Then there are telomeres, the end segments of a DNA strand, which are naturally lost in normal cell division. Over time, after we’ve lost too many telomeres, our cells lose their ability to divide into new cells. Without these new cells,
we can’t rebuild body tissue, and when we can’t rebuild body tissue, we age. But the theory that has provided the most interesting results has to do with hormones.

The thinking goes that all animals are extremely efficient machines throughout their reproductive years, but afterward — because their evolutionary purpose has been accomplished — start to break down. Scientists believe this breakdown is triggered by a loss in hormones, which has been directly linked to everything from mental fuzziness and low libido to a variety of age-related disease like Alzheimer’s, arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. “The old idea,” says Rothenberg, “was that our hormones decline because we age. The new idea is that we age because our hormones decline.”

So the anti-aging world hit upon an obvious solution: Replace the missing hormones.

Testosterone is one of the main hormones that needs replacement (pretty much every steroid on the market works by mimicking testosterone, so when people say steroids, much of the time, they mean testosterone), as it starts to decline in most people by their late twenties. Technically, testosterone is both an anabolic and androgenic steroid. Anabolic means it builds tissue up; androgenic refers to any hormone that impacts the development and maintenance of male sexual characteristics.

The earliest known research into this hormone dates back to 1767, when a Scottish scientist failed to learn much of anything by transplanting the testicles of a rooster into the abdomen of a hen. A hundred years later, German zookeeper and professor Arnold Berthold picked up this thread and castrated a series of cockerels and afterward reported that the animals’ most definitive male sexual characteristics vanished alongside their testicles. Gone were the flamboyant comb, the aggressive behavior, and any interest in the opposite sex. But — and this was the finding that marked our first step down the road toward anti-aging medicine — he also found that these changes could be reversed by injecting his castrati with an as-of-yet-unnamed substance extracted from their testicles.

Two decades after Berthold’s breakthrough, our first steroid controversy arrived when noted French neurologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard began injecting himself with extract of animal testes — mostly guinea pigs and dogs, but sheep were sampled too — and finding the effects so rejuvenating that he spent his remaining years championing this potion as a way to prolong life. While extract of guinea pig testes wasn’t exactly a hot seller, in the early 1930s, Dutch pharmacologist Ernst Laqueur managed to isolate 10 milligrams of crystalline testosterone from 100 kilograms of bull testicles, and that changed everything. Suddenly, researchers could pick apart testosterone’s chemical structure; suddenly, they could experiment. Synthetic versions soon followed, as did reports of Swedish athletes taking Rejuven, a performance enhancer that worked via a small dose of testosterone. At the 1936 Olympics, there were rumors of German competitors — fueled by Hitler’s dreams of Aryan perfection — taking even larger doses.

By the early 1940s, testosterone was being touted as everything from a way to increase sex drive in aging men to a way to increase productivity in society. The real dam broke in 1945, when science writer Paul de Kruif published
The Male Hormone
. Bullish about testosterone and the impact it would have on our economy and our health, de Kruif foretold riches for the drug’s manufacturers and increased vigor and extended life for its consumers. And all of this was big news. Critics loved the book.
Newsweek
gave it a full-page review;
Reader’s Digest
published an excerpt. It was the moment that anti-aging medicine went mainstream.

That moment didn’t last for long.

4.

The trouble started in the 1960s, when female Eastern Bloc athletes started looking a little too buff and doing a little too well at the Olympics. Steroids, it was suddenly clear, threatened the
level playing field of sport, jeopardizing the foundation of athletic competition and, by extension, the very big business surrounding it.

By 1975, steroids were added to the Olympics’ list of banned substances. College and professional football soon followed, with other sports eventually getting in line. But it was already too late. Athletes had heard about the performance-enhancing powers of testosterone, and the bans weren’t enough. Something else needed to be done. And that something, well . . . this is when things got a little strange.

“The organized-sports establishment decided to ‘solve’ the problem by educating athletes,” says Rick Collins, our foremost legal authority on steroids and author of
Legal Muscle
, the de facto bible on the subject. “They devised a strategy: Convince athletes that anabolic steroids don’t build muscle. It was a lie, of course, so they needed a credible source to sell the message. They picked the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) to spread the news, a bit like the Ministry of Truth spread false propaganda in George Orwell’s classic
1984
.”

This wasn’t yet
1984
, this was still 1977 — but the ACSM took to issuing proclamations: “Steroids have no effect on lean muscle mass; the effects athletes are seeing are the result of water retention; the effects are all placebo.” These claims held sway until the
real
1984, when there was so much anecdotal evidence to the contrary that the ACSM finally had to admit that, yes, those 300-pound beasts playing left tackle could only have gotten to be 300-pound beasts with the help of anabolic steroids.

Next the ACSM came up with a different approach — tell the athletes that steroids are bad for them. Make them sound horrible. Magnify every negative side effect from every study that had ever been run. When in doubt — prevaricate. “One California physician associated with the NFL,” wrote Collins in
Legal Muscle
, “made the completely unsupported assertion that ‘young athletes who take heavy doses of anabolic steroids should expect to die in their thirties and forties.’ ”

But then another fact came to light — high school kids were starting to use steroids. Congress had to act. Some say their actions were motivated by an authentic desire to help, some talk of the drug war’s relentless need for new bad guys, some about the fact that “save our children” always fills political war chests. Others bring up the multibillion-dollar industry that is professional sport and the heavy lobbying power that comes with those billions. In truth, it was probably all this and then some.

Whatever the case, in 1988, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act was passed, which made trafficking in steroids illegal, and a variety of subcommittees were formed to hear testimony about whether or not the drug should become a controlled substance. Among those who testified were Charles Yesalis, Penn State professor of health and human development and the world’s leading steroid authority at the time. “Steroids do have a medical use,” Yesalis told Congress. “From an epidemiologic point of view of the health dangers, I am much more concerned about heroin; I am much more concerned about cocaine; I am much more concerned about cigarettes than anabolic steroids.”

The American Medical Association, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Food and Drug Administration — the four regulatory agencies that are supposed to have control over the drug-scheduling process — all testified against turning steroids into a controlled substance. It didn’t matter. Senator Herbert Kohl spoke for many when he said, “Steroid users set an intolerable example for our nation’s youth.” It should also be mentioned that, at the time he was speaking, Senator Kohl was also the owner and president of the Milwaukee Bucks.

In 1990, Congress again upped the ante, this time passing the Anabolic Steroids Control Act — which criminalized these drugs. Five years later, a Los Angeles doctor named Walter Jekot was arrested for procuring and prescribing steroids for bodybuilders. His case went to the Supreme Court, where he pled guilty and served five years in federal prison. At the time, much of this was
front-page news; what was significantly less publicized was that because of his imprisonment, Walter Jekot is widely considered the AIDS epidemic’s first martyr.

5.

If you talk to anti-aging doctors about their work, it won’t be long before a healthy dose of paranoia creeps into the conversation. “All it takes is a whiff of a hint that I’m prescribing steroids for nonmedical reasons and they’ll shut me down and send me to jail,” said one doctor, who asked, not surprisingly, to remain anonymous. And he wasn’t alone. Almost half of the physicians interviewed for this story asked for the same. And in explaining their reticence to be named, most of them brought up Walter Jekot — their sad reminder of the dangers of taking a stand.

To understand this story, you need to know that until 1990, steroids were a prescription drug available to anyone with a note from their doctor. Since the 1960s, Jekot had been writing such notes for some of his patients, primarily athletes. He was still writing notes in 1982, when scientists identified a strange virus plaguing the gay community. A number of Jekot’s patients turned out to be HIV-positive, and a few of those patients were the same ones using steroids. By 1984, Jekot noticed that those HIV-positive, steroid-using patients were still alive, while everyone else seemed to be dropping like flies. These users weren’t succumbing to AIDS wasting syndrome; in fact, many of them looked downright healthy. In 1984, Walter Jekot became the first doctor to prescribe anabolic steroids as a treatment for AIDS.

Other doctors soon followed suit and before long there was a pile of experimental data and an established treatment protocol. Stories of this protocol spread quickly around the West Coast, but didn’t get national attention until 1995, when another HIV-positive doctor, Michael Dullnig, published an article in
Muscle
Media
magazine talking about his own experience with steroids. In the early days of HIV research, doctors used the immune cell CD4 as a marker of health. Normal, HIV-negative people have a CD4 count between 1,000 and 1,500, while AIDS is defined by a CD4 count below 200. When he started taking steroids, Dullnig had a CD4 count of four. He should have been dead within weeks. Instead, he regained forty pounds and lived and told his story in
Muscle Media
.

Because of Dullnig’s advice, an HIV-positive chemical engineer named Nelson Vergel also began taking steroids. “I put on thirty-five pounds during the next year or so. My immune response also improved, especially my CD8 T-cells, which went from 900 to 2,500 [as it turns out, CD8 cells — which are the immune cells boosted by steroids — are a much better indicator of health in HIV-positive people]. My symptoms basically disappeared. I never looked or felt better in my life, even when I was HIV-negative.”

This testimony appears in
Built to Survive: HIV Wellness Guide
, which Vergel coauthored with Los Angeles nutrition expert turned AIDS researcher Michael Mooney. The book is a step-by-step guide to beating back AIDS with nutrition, exercise, and steroids. It soon became the basis for both good medicine and epic struggle. “It was a crusade of sorts,” Mooney said. “Everyone we knew was dying, and a lot of these people were dying because of thirty years of antisteroid propaganda.”

Walter Jekot got caught in the middle. The government ignored his HIV work and claimed he was distributing the drugs to athletes and bodybuilders, and that was enough for the court. “They wanted to make an example out of someone,” says Mooney. “They chose Jekot. Was it a bad choice? Well, they scared the shit out of a lot of good doctors, and they spread a lot of bullshit about steroids that bad doctors believed as truth. It almost goes without saying that if things had gone differently, there’d be a few million HIV-positive people who’d still be alive today.”

It also goes without saying that if things had gone differently, then a whole lot of anti-aging doctors would feel a lot less insecure about the work they do.

6.

When I met with Dr. Rothenberg to discuss the results of my blood work, his job was to examine my hormonal health and make suggestions. We started out looking at my cholesterol and my triglycerides; next I got a short lesson on the dangers of trans fats. “My advice here is pretty simple,” says Rothenberg. “Fruits, vegetables, meats, fish are all fine. Frozen foods and canned goods — that’s the danger zone. Avoid the center aisles at the grocery stores and you’ll live longer.”

We work our way to C-reactive proteins, which are a great measure of inflammation in the body and the impact of age. “Chronic inflammation is both the cause and the effect of most of the diseases of aging,” says Rothenberg. “While acute inflammation may save your life (by cutting off blood flow to a wound), silent inflammation is what kills you.” My C-reactive proteins are okay, but there’s need for some DHEA, and that’s when things start to get controversial.

DHEA is a cousin of testosterone and estrogen and has been called everything from the fountain-of-youth hormone to the snake oil of the modern world. It is the most abundant steroid in the body, but production slows in our twenties. By age seventy, we make roughly 20 percent of the DHEA we had in our youth. As DHEA is a precursor to all major sex hormones, its decline is partially responsible for a sluggish sex drive. Research also shows that DHEA is useful in combating inflammation, depression, cognitive decline, Type II diabetes complications, cancer, arthritis, osteoporosis, and heart disease, but naysayers claim it’s worthless or dangerous or both. And while DHEA is currently available in most health food stores, those naysayers — many of
whom are reputable doctors and researchers — also caution that we don’t know enough about how the hormone works over time and that it should be classified as an investigational drug at best. Some go as far as saying that its wide availability is a disaster in the making. It was also these same DHEA detractors who worked very hard — unsuccessfully — to add it to the list of substances banned by the 2004 Steroid Control Act.