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This is and Article Courtesy of RollingStone.com published in February of '02. You may enjoy the stupidity.


Killer Bods

The sports-supplement industry sells steroids substitutes and herbal speed to millions of teens. It's all legal, but is it safe?




Chemical brothers: Alex Zarnas (left) and Ryan Seidel



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Alex Zarnas - sixteen, bull-necked, a tangle of dark curls - springs out of his plastic seat. In the Day-Glo gloom of this suburban Pennsylvania mall, he yanks off his hoodie with one clean shrug and throws down a biceps shot. The arm on view is a wondrous thing: vascular and bell-shaped, dense as marble. It is also three inches from my face.
"Nice," I say, speaking into his delt. "I think I've got it now."

"Yo, how about my chest? I'm totally shameless - I'll take my shirt off anywhere!"

Though it's ten o'clock on a Friday night and the booths at Charlie's Steakery are all but empty, I head him off. "Maybe tomorrow morning, when you train," I say.

"Dude, wait'll you see him, he's an animal in the gym," says Ryan Seidel, his best friend. Ryan - also sixteen, also thick through the trunk, though not as pneumatically carved as Alex - is in a fixed state of awe regarding his pal. For much of the last hour, he has raved up his "hardness" as well as his power over the girls at Parkland High. Now he is extolling Alex's stamina. "He does two hours just on chest, man!"

"Yeah, that's the andro," says Alex, grinning. "I don't know what it does, but you just want to blast nonstop. I'll take it sometimes and get so amped, I've got to, you know, go and, um . . ." He giggles, deferring to Ryan.

"He has to, like . . ."

I first met these two an hour earlier at a high school football game. On a windy fall night, the air braced for rain, a tilt between Parkland and the Stroudsburg Mounties fetched a crowd of 5,000 people. Families with blankets and stadium cushions thronged the Parkland Trojans' side. Junior cheerleaders, forty strong, shivered in gowns and sashes. At either end of the jewel-box park, swarms of teenagers paid the game no heed, flirting for all they were worth. In the merry collision of town pride and eros, it felt like being at a county fair where an impromptu rave has broken out.

"See, lots of kids come up to me in the hall and want to know how to get big," says Alex, who was a varsity wrestler last year, and, as such, a star on campus. "But they don't want to work, put in the hours. They're like, 'Yo, I need some cuts now.' And I know what they're thinking: This body can't be natural. I must be taking something."

"Well, but you are," I remind him, reading off the list I've tallied over Cokes and steak subs. "Andro and creatine and protein powder, plus those ephedrine drinks last year that made you hyper. I'd say that's a lot of somethings."

Alex bristles. He has packed on forty pounds of muscle in less than two summers, which lends him a certain authority on the subject. He also has a teen's contempt for caution or consequences.

"Look, all that stuff's legal," he says. "If it was dangerous, they couldn't put it out there. And I'll tell you the same thing I told my parents: At least I'm not doing steroids."

For all his swagger, Alex is thoughtful and clear-spoken, a well-raised child. I ask whether I can call his mother. "By all means," he says. "She's a biology professor. She's checked this out A to Z."

On the phone, Eileen Zarnas is impressively learned, with a clinician's cool aplomb. "Yes, I have looked into these products," she says. "I care what goes into his body. And the studies I've read on creatine and andro suggest that the risk is low."

Of the parents I've talked to about kids and supplements, she's the first one who knows the names of the drugs, let alone who speaks to their safety. "So you're not concerned about side effects, or any dangers down the road?"

She thinks a moment, weighing her words. "Well, yes, sure, I'm concerned. I am a mother, and these studies aren't definitive. And there's always the fear that when Alex is older, he'll want to try something stronger. But look, he's a smart, level kid with a head on his shoulders. I have to trust him not to do the wrong thing."

In 1998, Mark McGwire, then the mountain-size slugger of the St. Louis Cardinals, inspired two kinds of pop-cult notoriety. The first was for hitting seventy home runs in a season, breaking by nine the record set in 1961 by Roger Maris. The second, and apparently more lasting fame - McGwire's mark was itself toppled last season by Barry Bonds - attended his use of a sports supplement called andro. Androstenedione, as it's known to scientists, is a minor male hor-mone that is synthesized in labs and sold in vitamin stores. At the time, it was presumed by a credulous press to have been partly responsible for McGwire's Bunyanesque blasts, though not a shred of evidence, then or since, has suggested that andro increases power or bat speed.

A similar furor arose that same summer around the Chicago Cubs' Sammy Sosa, whose sixty-six homers were presumed by some to have been assisted by his use of creatine. An amino-acid compound that is stored in muscles and converted to energy for short bursts of strength, creatine is available in an artificial version that is also sold in retail stores everywhere, alongside vitamins and herbal remedies. But here again, the facts weren't especially convenient; although recent studies suggest there is an increase in exercise stamina, not a single study performed at the time (or since) proved that store-bought creatine enhances strength.

In the end, though, the marketplace rendered its scientific opinion: Sales of creatine tripled from 1998 to 2001, according to the Sports Medicine Institute for Young Athletes, meaning there are now 18 million users worldwide. Andro's popularity rose even higher - industry sources reported that its sales went up by 1,000 percent in the twelve months following McGwire's feat. Together with ephedrine, an over-the-counter herbal stimulant that boosts energy and aggression in users, they are fixtures in a new teenage drug subculture: the world of legal steroid substitutes and speed.

Real steroids, of course, are widely known to be dangerous and for the most part require a prescription to obtain. The supplements we're talking about are referred to by scientists as analogues, or knockoffs, of the substances they mimic, and have recently turned into a $4 billion-a-year industry. Accord-ing to a nationwide study released last summer by the Healthy Competition Foundation, an institute funded by Blue Cross and Blue Shield, approximately 1 million kids between twelve and seventeen have taken sport supplements.

Now what, you ask, is a child of twelve doing with a bottle of Andro-Tek? Why, trying to carve biceps like his hero McGwire, whose exploits, as noted by a University of Michigan survey, might have been responsible for this sharp spike in supplement use by boys. And what would inspire a fifteen-year-old to take Xenadrine, a potent, speedlike ephedrine pill? It might be all those ads in the muscle mags featuring stars such as St. Louis Rams running back Marshall Faulk, who touted the herbal drug as "the most effective performance-enhancement supplement I've ever taken."

Like the players they worship, who get bigger and bulkier each year, schoolboys are pumping themselves up with high-dose combos of sports supps. They take products with names such as Red Rage, Thermo Speed (ephedrine drinks), Animal Stak, Universal Lava - their very names like cartoon captions for hyperbolic manhood. So, too, are the fire-breathing claims by their makers: "Maximum muscle in minimum time!" "Will hit you like a goddamn knockout punch!" "Get ultraripped in just seventy-two hours!"

In point of fact, these products are vastly less effective at building muscle than steroids or human-growth hormone are. Nor have they replaced 'roids as the dope of choice among professional and college athletes. For adult players determined to add size and strength, sports supplements are mainly add-ons, side dishes to the real stuff's main course.

But for teens without the cash or access to steroids, supplements have their virtues - mainly that of being cheap, legal and available. In fact, thanks to an audacious act of Congress (see "Eat Your Andro," Page 56), supplements are everywhere, although there is evidence, and even deaths of young athletes, to suggest that some of these substances pose a real danger.

"But, hey, at least i'm not doing steroids. . . ."

In the course of a week in Allentown, Pennsylvania, I heard that remark, or others just like it, from dozens of bulked-up boys. Their reasons for starting on supps were also strikingly similar: "I was too thin"; "I was too fat"; "I want to wrestle"; "I want to play football"; "The girls wouldn't put out. . . ." For most of the boys I met, it was a lifestyle decision, accorded the same care and deliberation as the gel-vs.-mousse debate: "I'll try this stuff once, give it a month; if it sucks, maybe I'll go get my tongue pierced."

Ninety miles west of New York, Allentown is a tollbooth to the American middle. The bleak inner city, festooned with flags, is the usual small-town study in rust: pawn shops and dime stores and shuttered bodegas. But just a mile to the north, the whole scene changes. Handsome communities with ponds and parks fan out into rolling pasture. Saabs and Volvos crowd Shop-Rite lots; even middle schools have their own stadiums. On the vast green lawn of Whitehall High, I met clusters of kids who bragged about their supp use.

"Most dudes'll lie to you and say it's for sports, but let's all be real - it's for girls," says Mike Neeb, flanked by four friends at the Whitehall-Lehighton game. "I'm not six-three, and I'm not going to play pro ball. All's I wanted to do was bulk up nice and get my ass grabbed by chicks. Which I have."

As a rail-thin junior dying to gain weight, he drank six shakes a day with protein powder and took Cell-Tech, a creatine mix. He quickly put on twenty pounds and tripled his maximum set on the bench press. He made the varsity football squad of a solid Lehighton team. It was in the locker room that he began to hear about andro from other, even bigger guys. Lots of them were doing it and were adding Ripped Fuel or Red Rage for that wild-eyed ephedrine rush. Sure, the combination sent your heart rate soaring, and sometimes your brain would be spinning so fast you thought you'd scream or pass out. But if you wanted to do monster squats or be an assassin at free safety, this was the "stack," or combination, for you.

One night, after eight months on andro, Mike felt a stab in his shoulder. He was at the gym, killing himself, and he figured the pain was exhaustion. But once home, he promptly passed out and had to be rushed to the emergency room, where CPR was frantically performed. After three days in intensive care, with spasms and chest pain and his family and friends saying prayers, he was told by a doctor that the supplements he had taken were temporarily constricting an artery.

"He goes, 'I can't say for sure that it was one or the other, but I'd stay far away from andro,' " says Mike.

"And have you?" I ask, eyeing his half-moon traps through the Lycra of a sprayed-on shirt.

"Oh, shit, yeah," he says. "Now I stick to Cell-Tech. I recommend it."

One of the kids he commends it to is a friend's younger brother: "He's fifteen and huge, with shoulders for days. He could start for some colleges now." The boy began taking an ephedrine product, "and suddenly he's got major asthma. He has to come out of games to use this inhaler and gets these sinus deals that last all winter."

"Then why does he take it?"

" 'Cause he wants to play pro basketball, man," Mike says. "You can't take away his dream!"

Mike's mother, Brenda Neeb, is unswayed by such foolishness. "Mike knows I don't approve of him taking that stuff," she says, "especially after he wound up in the hospital with what the doctor thought was a heart attack. Thankfully, it turned out to be something else: acute thoracic spasms was what they called it. But I've had a heart attack at a young age, and believe me, it's no joke. That's why he doesn't do [supps] around me. He knows I'll be furious."

Brad Youwakim - five feet eleven, sculpted, with the kind of barn-door shoulders you usually see in NFL weight rooms - tells a comparably nervous tale. Last year, as a two-sport star at nearby Northampton, he wrestled in the spring and played football in the fall, a fierce hitter in the open field. Like "most of the guys," he says, he'd take something for energy before a game or practice. "I'd go with a stacker like Ripped Fuel or Xenadrine, whereas other guys did andro poppers," he says.

On the sidelines the night of the 2000 season opener, he suddenly began to sweat through his pants and jersey and couldn't seem to catch his breath. He dropped to one knee, feeling dizzy and faint. His heart would not stop racing. Panic set in; he tried to keep calm but was stricken by the thought that he might die right there, with his parents looking on from the stands.

"Did they know what was happening, or that you were taking this stuff?" I ask.

"Well, yeah, more or less. I mean, my father bought it, or at least he gave me the money."

"Then he approves?"

"Uh, I wouldn't say approves. He's pretty old-school - he thinks you can get this big with just diet and exercise."

Reached at home by phone, Brad's father, Abe, sounds skeptical. "He hardly touches that stuff, only a little before workouts - or at least that's what he told me," he says. "He doesn't need supplements, he has great genetics, and I should know - he gets it from me! I'm fifty-one, and I do everything the all-natural way. No, I think he's pulling your leg, sir. He wouldn't risk his health. I'm sure he was exaggerating."

"That's what he told you?" Brad says when I report back. "Well, whatever with that. But I'm telling you, ephedrine is evil shit. My heart was going a million miles an hour, and I was just head to toe with sweat. I mean, I'd taken that stuff before and had been OK, though at night it'd be hard getting to sleep. But this time was different, and it just went on and on. I was like, how can they even sell this stuff legally?"

It's a question that a lot of people are asking. Following the deaths in 2001 of twelve football players - the toll ranges from a fourteen-year-old high schooler in Houston to Pro Bowl offensive tackle Korey Stringer of the Minnesota Vikings, and includes elite college athletes Devaughn Darling of Florida State and Rashidi Wheeler of Northwestern, both of whom collapsed on the practice field after taking ephedrine-laced products - there has been an outcry from lawmakers and consumer groups. Henry Waxman, the Democratic congressman from California, has called for a top-to-bottom inquiry by the Food and Drug Administration into ephedrine's role in the deaths. Public Citizen, Ralph Nader's watchdog group, petitioned the agency to pull the stimulant off shelves, having analyzed a series of FDA documents that linked it to eighty-one deaths. Bill Lockyer, the attorney general of California, has filed lawsuits against dozens of makers of andro, calling it a steroid that violates the state's Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act. Responding to the lawsuits, the legislative director of the National Nutritional Foods Association, which represents the supplement industry, replied that the FDA could take the product off the shelves if "they conclude it presents an unreasonable risk of injury or illness" (see "Eat Your Andro," Page 56). Even the NFL, in a long-belated move, has banned players from using or endorsing ephedrine.

"Supplements have become a huge problem for kids and for amateur sports in particular," says Dr. Gary Wadler, a professor of medicine at New York University School of Medicine and the leading expert at the World Anti-Doping Agency, which monitors drug use at the Olympics. "Take ephedrine, for instance, which these companies combine with caffeine and phenylpropanolamine. At the suggested dose - and kids take multiples of that, for maximum acceleration - it replicates the clinical effects of amphetamines, including an elevated heart rate and temperature. Now put a boy in full pads under a broiling sun, where he's already at risk of dehydration, and you've got an ideal recipe for stroke."

Or possibly psychosis, even. The FDA keeps a database of "adverse events," which are reported to the agency by victims' doctors or lawyers and by consumers. There are currently hundreds of lawsuits against the manufacturers of ephedrine, including class-action cases against two of the largest makers. John Tiedt, a Los Angeles attorney, has brought dozens of suits on behalf of victims; thus far, eight have been settled out of court. His clients include a seventeen-year-old boy in Georgia and a twenty-year-old girl in Tennessee, both of whom allegedly suffered what Tiedt calls "psychotic breaks" after taking Hydroxycut, one of the more popular brands of ephedrine. The girl supposedly thought she was hearing the voice of God and followed white cars around on a highway. The boy reported auditory delusions, telling him to walk into fireworks.

"I've reviewed all the literature I can about the possible side effects of psychosis," says Stuart Lowther, manager of research and development for MuscleTech, the company that makes Hydroxycut, "and I haven't found any clinical evidence that ephedrine is linked to psychotic reactions. I have read some isolated case reports [of it] where the subjects used far in excess of the recommended dosage, on the order of 1,000 milligrams."

"Seemingly every day, I get a call from another kid who's been hurt by ephedrine," says Tiedt. "Recently, it was a boy from Utah on, get this, a Mormon football team, who suffered a seizure during the halftime break. He said, 'Half the team's doing Ripped Fuel, the other's taking Yellow Jackets [another ephedrine product]' - and this is in Utah, a dry state!"

Between 1993 and 2000, more than 1,400 ephedrine-related adverse events were filed with the FDA, including thirty-two heart attacks, seventy seizures and sixty-two cases of arrhythmia. Though no one knows how many of these involve kids, it's clear that even young hearts can be endangered.

"During exercise, both the heart rate and blood pressure increase, raising the chances of a cardiac event," says Larry Sasich, a pharmacist and researcher at Public Citizen's Health Research Group. "But with ephedrine, the heart can beat so fast that it's no longer pushing blood. All it's doing is quivering, really, shaking like a bowl of jelly. The result can be a sudden cardiac failure, which is almost always fatal."

In such events, there's usually a pre-existing cardiac defect that hadn't been diagnosed. A kid looks healthy, has no history of heart woes and assumes he's invulnerable. It's an assumption abetted by the supplement makers, who tout the safety and purity of their wares, even as they attach labels that warn about the possible dangers to young users. "Our label says that no one under the age of eighteen should take this product," says Lowther, "and we don't recommend that they do."

"This industry loves to make claims for its products that sound like medical fact," says Sasich. " 'Ephedrine will get you strong and fast safely!' 'Andro will grow lean muscle!' Well, nothing could be further from the clinical truth. Andro, from all evidence, does not build muscle but does dispose you to long-term risk of prostate cancer."

One of a number of male hormones (testosterone being the strongest), andro is produced naturally by the adrenal glands and testes and has little to do with muscle. But when lab versions glut the body's pathways, there is a jump not in male but in female hormones, which suggests that the fake stuff gets changed to estrogen. What can happen, in the hormonal chaos, is a whole host of unhappy developments: a shrinking of the testicles and an accompanying sperm loss, and the appearance of doughy breasts on athletic boys.

Of course, no one makes products featuring andro alone; the real money is in combos, or "stacks." The most popular brands these days are chemical brews of steroid analogues, ephedrine and "growth" - synthesized versions of human growth hormone. Animal Stak, for instance, contains ephedrine, as well as agents that promote secretion of human growth hormone. CycloRoid adds a legal copy of the banned steroid nandrolone, then tops it off with an exotic herb called tribulus terrestris. Purported to block the conversion of andro to estrogen and therefore send testosterone levels soaring, it has yet to be tested in human beings, and its side effects are unknown. But in sheep, the herb has caused liver damage and a disorder called "staggering disease."

Like ephedrine, andro is banned by the NFL as well as the NCAA and the International Olympic Committee. Major League Baseball allows players to go on taking the stuff while it conducts its own inquiry into the drug.

"We don't test for steroids - it's a collective-bargaining issue, and something that's being discussed with the players," says Patrick Courtney, director of media relations at MLB's office in New York. "But with everything that happened around the McGwire incident, we commissioned a major study on andro, looking into the possible long-term side effects as well as the performance part. It's been ongoing for a couple of years, and we'd like to look into it some more. Creatine's another product under study, and we're looking for help here from the FDA. Because, frankly, if it's not something banned by the FDA - or any other sport, if I'm not mistaken - it would be next to impossible for us to ban it here."

Courtney is right: Creatine hasn't been banned at any level. In fact, the latest studies suggest that athletes can train using creatine without raising their injury risk. Made in small sums by the liver and kidneys, the organic version is converted to adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, a compound that drives muscles during exertion. Our bodies make enough ATP to fuel bursts of extra strength lasting ten seconds or so. To work longer and stronger, more must be made, which is where store-bought creatine comes in. It is marginally useful for boosting ATP, but it soaks up water into muscle tissue, which can lead to dehydration and cramping. Anecdotal evidence shows that there is stress on the liver and kidneys to metabolize the excess creatine. Many of the kids talked about "pissing fire," wincing to describe the stench. What they may be smelling is their own organs pickling: According to a 2000 study conducted at the University of Saskatchewan, "Chronic administration of a large quantity of creatine can increase the production of formaldehyde," which is marvelous - if you're preserving frogs.

How do coaches handle the question of tolerating the use of supps?

"I certainly don't push these products on players," says Chris Gerhard, Brad Youwakim's former football coach at Northampton High School, "though I've had kids who used them with great success - linemen types who gained size and strength and went on to play ball in college. But I've never told a kid to use creatine or anything that might be considered unhealthy. In fact, when I've had kids who bought it - strictly on their own, you know - I've sent home educational literature to their parents, so they could help them make an informed decision."

The use of supplements is "against school policy," says Bill Brong, Gerhard's counterpart at neighboring Lehighton High. "We don't support the use of anything like that here. If parents want to buy that stuff for their kids, the risk is totally on them. We've been approached by local distributors to use their products as part of our training program. And we know it's widespread - I've heard that some schools actually supply them - but we tell our kids not to try them. And if I knew that they were, not that it's ever happened, I'd send them straight to the nurse's office so they could hear, first-hand, about the side effects."

On my last day in Allentown, I paid a final visit to a GNC store. On an earlier visit, I'd asked a red-shirted clerk whether he warned kids away from certain supps. It was, admittedly, a trick question; boys as young as fourteen told me they bought ephedrine and andro without hassle there.

"Well, we have to sell it to them - it's the law," he said. "We can't ask for ID."

"But do you tell them about side effects, or steer them to safer things?"

He looked over his shoulder toward the register. "Yeah, I won't sell 'em andro," he whispered, "especially if they're young, although their parents'll buy it for 'em anyway. And with ephedrine, I try to offer a stimulant-free product like Scan Diet."

"But if they insist on buying Ripped Fuel or Xenadrine?"

He sighed. "Then I'd definitely warn 'em to cycle up slow. These aren't the kinds of things you fool around with."

On this day, GNC staff outnumber shoppers. Then a couple of kids stroll in. They're fourteen, maybe fifteen - hats to the back, the swagger of would-be thugs but for a mouthful of braces and a certain red-cheeked glow.

I poke along behind them, sussing the boys' dilemma. It seems they had just enough cash for a can of Crea-Tek or the brand-new John Madden video game, but not both. The game had bangin' graphics, as well as a guest appearance by Pharaohe Monch - but the Tek, as they call it, got you stupid large, and it cycled smooth with andro. It was a ticklish decision, one not to be made lightly; they trawl the aisles, consulting. Then, at long last, clarity: Halloween was coming, and you needed all your shine for that.

"Yo, son, I'm going as the dude from Gladiator," one says. "I gotta grow to glow."

PAUL SOLOTAROFF
(RS 889 - Feb. 14, 2002)

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