Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Is Turkesterone a Safe and Effective “Natural Steroid”?

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

I’ve churned through over 150,000 emails, social media comments and messages, and blog comments in the last 6 years. And that means I’ve fielded a ton of questions. As you can imagine, some questions pop up more often than others, and I thought it might be helpful to take a little time every month to choose a few and record and share my answers. So, in this round, I answer the following question: Does turkesterone safely and effectively boost muscle growth? If you have a question you’d like me to answer, leave a comment below or if you want a faster response, send an email to [e-mail]. Timestamps 3:31 - What is turkesterone? 5:26 - What do companies selling turkesterone claim? 7:16 - What does human research say about ecdysteroids? 11:10 - How might these ecdysteroids work in the body? 12:41 - Are ecdysterone supplement labels accurate? 14:26 - What's my position on turkesterone? Mentioned on the Show: BLACK FRIDAY SALE! Shop Legion Supplements Here: https://buylegion.com

Hey, I'm Mike Matthews, and this is Muscle for Life. Thank you, thank you for joining me today. If you haven't already, please do take a moment to subscribe to the show in whatever app you are listening to me in so you don't miss any new episodes. And it helps me because it boosts the rankings of the show in the various charts. So today's episode is about terkesterone, which is something I've been getting asked about a lot over the last couple of months, along with TRT. That's probably going to be my next monologue. And peptides. I've been getting asked a lot about those as well, so that'll probably follow TRT. But today we're talking about terkesterone, which some people are claiming is a natural steroid, a natural safe steroid. That's how people who are selling terkesterone are pitching it. And many people

who endorse it are saying that you can get anabolic steroid like effects or benefits without the unwanted side effects. And so in this episode, I'm going to be talking about what is terkesterone, what are the purported benefits, what are the evidence for those benefits, and what should we conclude based on the current weight of the evidence. Also, if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me do more of it, please do check out my sports nutrition company, Legion. Because while you don't need supplements to build muscle, lose fat, and get healthy, the right ones can help. And that's why over 300,000 discerning fitness folk have chosen Legion and left over 25,000 five-star reviews for our products

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post-purchase glow. Okay, so what is terkesterone? Well, terkesterone is an ectosteroid, E-C-D-Y steroid. And that is a class of compound that is structurally similar to androgens, to the hormones that promote the development of masculine traits in humans like hair and muscle growth and deeper voice and strength and so forth. But ectosteroids are produced by plants and fungi. And there are two types of ectosteroids. There are zoo, I couldn't find the pronunciation online. It's probably zoo-o-ectosteroids, Z-O-O-ectosteroids, or just zoo-ectosteroids. That sounds wrong to me, but again, I couldn't find a pronunciation online. And phyto-ectosteroids. So zoo-o-ectosteroids, I'm just going to pronounce it like that. Those are hormones that control

molting and metamorphosis of anthropods, of animals with exoskeletons like insects and crabs. And then there are phytoectosteroids. And those are hormones produced by various plants and fungi, and they act as a defense against plant-eating insects. And when insects, when they eat the plants or the fungi containing the phytoectosteroids, they may prematurely molt, lose weight, or suffer other metabolic damage and then die. So terkesterone is a phytoectosteroids. And recently, over the last six months or so, terkesterone has been gaining a lot of popularity. Go plug it into Google Trends, for example, and you'll see a sharp upward trajectory over the last six months. And it is particularly popular in the body

composition space, people who want to gain muscle and gain strength and lose fat. And many of the companies selling terkestrone and many of the people promoting it will reference quite a few studies that seem to show that it does indeed increase muscle protein synthesis rates. And it does increase muscle growth, even when you're in a calorie deficit and increase muscle fiber size and enhance physical performance and improve general wellbeing, increase appetite, improve digestion,

improve glucose sensitivity and utilization. I mean, this is a long list and I could cite studies. If I wanted to sell you terkesterone, I could cite studies for all of this, lowering cholesterol, relieving osteoporosis, enhancing wound healing, producing anti-inflammatory effects in the body. And all of that sounds great and is used to sell a lot of this stuff. of this stuff. But when you look beneath the abstracts, when you actually look at the papers that I would be citing to claim all of those things, you'd realize that they're all animal

research. And animal research is important. It does help us understand different mechanisms by which a substance might work. And it does highlight possible effects, possible benefits in humans. But you should never directly extrapolate animal research to humans. Even if we share 99% of our DNA with the animals, we are not big rodents, right? You should never assume that because something does something in rats or other animals, that it will probably do the same thing in humans. And in the case of terkestrone and other phytoectosteroids, there is very little human research. Now, one study that terkestrone boosters love to refer to as proof that the pudding is as good as they say it is, it actually didn't look at terkesterone. It studied ectosterone, which is a similar ectosteroid. And in this study,

which was conducted by scientists at German Sport University Cologne, 46 male participants with at least one year's weightlifting experience, barbell training experience, they were split into one of four groups. You had a placebo group who took placebo pills every day, and they lifted weights three times per week. You had a low dose group who took 200 milligrams. They took two 100 milligram pills of, of ectosterone per day, and they lifted weights three days per week. And then you had a high dose group, 800 mg of ectosterone per day, three days of weightlifting per week. And then a control group who took two 100 milligram pills of ectestrone per day and did not lift any weights. They just sat around. And after 10 weeks

of popping pills and lifting weights or not lifting weights, here is how the results were reported. You had about four and a half pounds of muscle gain in the high dose group. You had about three and a half pounds in the low dose group, which are impressive results, but maybe not enough to make you want to rush to the bowels of the internet with your wallet in hand, ready to buy a couple months worth of terkesterone. However, if that does get you excited, we have to keep talking about the other two groups because this is where it gets weird. So in this study, the placebo group that lifted weights, they took placebo pills, lifted weights like everyone else, like the people taking the ectosterone, those guys, they lost almost a pound of muscle. Whereas the group that took 200 milligrams of ectosterone and just sat

on their butts the whole time gained about a half a pound of muscle on average. And, you know, there's a word for that. It's called suspicious. Somehow we are to believe that simply taking the ectosterone turned out to be more effective than lifting weights for muscle gain, that you'd be better off just taking the stuff and sitting around and skipping the gym. And we've seen results like that in testosterone studies where people are taking rather large amounts of testosterone and that leading to muscle gain. We know that that can happen, but to believe that it happened here, that's a stretch. And perhaps even more bizarre than that is the fact that an analysis of the supplements used in the trial, afterward the analysis was done, it showed that although the label

on the bottle of the ectosterone pills said each pill contained 100 milligrams of the stuff, they really only had six milligrams per pill. So that means that the high dose group took a tiny amount of a Gistrone during the trial, nowhere near enough to produce an effect based on even the animal research that we have. If you use that dosing to calibrate human dosing, and yet we are to believe that those people allegedly built muscle like it was going out of fashion. And that's probably why that study and those results have been challenged by other research conducted by scientists at University of Mary Harden Baylor, which found that ectosterone has no effect on fat loss, muscle and strength gain, or hormone levels. Now, incidentally,

this study had a much better design and it used more accurate methods of measuring muscle gain and fat loss than the German study. And so the bottom line is, although these molecules are interesting, these ectosteroids, these phytoectosteroids, we just don't know much about how they work, what they do in the body, both good and bad. Now, recent research has proposed a plausible pathway by which these molecules might be able to affect different body functions, including muscle hypertrophy and energy production. But that hypothesis has not been thoroughly investigated yet. And until it has been, I wouldn't get too excited about this stuff because so many natural molecules show promise

in initial research, scientific soundings, I guess you could say, and then fail to pan out in human research. It happens again and again and again. And I'll say that I will be surprised. I'll be surprised if a few years from now, I am saying, hey, I was wrong about ectosteroids or I was too pessimistic about them. I mean, I do think I'm being fair and balanced, so to speak, about the current weight of the evidence, but I'm making a prediction saying, I don't think that these molecules are going to unseat creatine, for example, like some people are claiming. However, if I'm wrong, then I'll be wrong. And if they are not only safe, but also effective And if they are not only safe, but also effective supplements, then I suppose I would take them myself and maybe even sell them. But until then, until I know that they are first safe and second effective, I would not take them and I would not recommend them. And something else I should mention, something that should steer you away from these supplements is a recent study that was conducted by scientists at the Free University of Berlin.

And in this case, researchers analyzed 12 ectosteroid containing supplements to see how accurate their labels were. And the researchers, what they found is eight of them, eight of the 12 contained far less ectosteroid than the labels claimed. And in six cases, the actual amount was found to be less than 20% of what was reported on the labels. And so if you are buying something like terkestrone, just know that it's a gamble. You don't really know what you're buying. And remember that if someone is willing to lie to you about the amount of an ingredient that is in a supplement, if they're willing to say it has 200 milligrams per serving, and let's say it has 10 milligrams per serving, they probably will be willing to cut other corners too. Maybe for example, they are going to spike their terkesterone supplement with a cheap androgen, a small amount of an anabolic steroid

that's cheap and that will produce some benefits, but also might produce some side effects depending on what the drug is and what the dose is. But the point is, if you wanted to buy anabolic steroids, orals, you would just buy that stuff. If you are thinking about buying an ectosteroid, it's probably because it's pitched as a natural steroid, a natural safe alternative to anabolic steroids that has no downsides. And so my position on terkesterone currently is a pass. I would recommend you skip it unless you just want to experiment, I guess, and you don't mind taking your health into your own hands, so to speak. Not that I would expect major unwanted side effects from terkesterrone. But again, you don't know what you're getting when you buy terkestrone unless you are going to send it off to a lab for

analysis for not only terkestrone content, but also contaminants, stuff you wouldn't want in there like androgens. And I'll say that even if you know somebody, let's say who sells terkestrone and you trust this person, understand that they could be getting hosed by their supplier. For example, my sports nutrition company Legion gets contacted all the time by ingredient suppliers for supplements, usually suppliers overseas, usually from China. And their pitch is I could dramatically cut my cost of goods across the board. I could cut my cost of whey protein in half. I could cut my cost of beta alanine in half and other ingredients I use a lot of in cut those costs at least in half by switching to them. And the ingredients are the ingredients. They say, if the FDA comes knocking and tests your products, it will have these ingredients and it will test

in the amounts that it needs to test in. And so many supplement companies jump at these opportunities because it can mean a lot of profit. I could double the bottom line of my business if I went down that road, but I have not and will never because I only buy ingredients that come from suppliers that I trust and that people I know who have been in the industry for a long time, especially people who have been on the operations side for a long time. I buy from suppliers that those people vouch for. I take beta alanine. A good example of this. Beta alanine is beta alanine?

No. Shoddy, low quality, inexpensive beta alanine won't give you the tingles, for example. That is always a red flag. If a pre-workout, for instance, has at least a couple of grams of beta-alanine, you should feel some tingling. If you don't, it is pre-workout, for example, which has a high quality, expensive beta alanine, if you get tingles from that, and then you try another pre-workout that has, call it two to four grams of beta alanine, and you feel no tingles, red flag. Some beta alanine material out there, it's a dud. And some of it is good. And it can be hard to know what's good and what's not. If you don't know what I just

told you, for example, which I learned from again, people I go to people I trust for advice on where to source ingredients from. So anyway, all of that is to say that somebody can want to make an honest terkesterone supplement or any supplement for that matter. But if they don't know how to source ingredients properly, they can end up with junk. Well, I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did subscribe to the show, because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you. shoot me an email, mike at muscleforlife.com,

muscleforlife.com, and let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I'm always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.