The Testosterone/DHT Conspiracy
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@PrinceTrebata Some go super overboard, but like I mentioned above, there's fitness influencers(not bodybuilders) who aren't ridiculously huge and gross looking. You don't have to inject a bunch of test and take a bunch of orals to look healthy and masculine. You can obviously criticize the disgusting looking bodybuilders on crazy amounts of roids, but there's guys with good collagen and health who take lower levels of test.
I agree with you though, I think DHT powder or androsterone is more important.●○ ANTI-SOL BRAH ● ANTI-TRAD WIFE ○●
☆ N I E T Z S C H E A N ★ -
It sounds cliche but I think ancient Greece and Italian Renaissance sculptures best encapsulate the ideal physique for most men. Minus sone outliers that still look insanely aesthetic like Arnold or Cbum, but unless thats your job profession it looks over done. You're right that many fitness models don't over do it and have tremendous physiques, but despite all that testoterone they still often look less manly than even our grandparents generation. Alain delon has the physique of a child, a "pretty boy" esque face yet still had a more "masculine" presence than any modern influencer, at least imo. It leads me to believe that Testosterone is not as important as the general online sphere makes it seem.
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to me it's possible to hop on gear whilst maintaining relatively good health. it's just that all you hear about is people who took ridiculous amounts while living a terrible lifestyle (eating loads of terrible food for the sake of gaining mass, deviously alternating between bulking and cutting periods which can take a toll on your metabolism, possible use of other drugs in the meantime) and obviously end up paying the dues for their actions. if you dial up your androgens you're gonna get a more pronounced repair response, which in the presence of inflammation caused by the activities mentioned earlier is gonna have severe health repercussions.
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As much as I want to believe the premise, I have to admit that I am a bit skeptical of the idea that young people today are less masculine in terms of physical attributes. I don't really see that out there. I graduated high school in the mid-90s and just thinking back to that time, I don't recall us being any more masculine (physically) than the kids I see today working in the grocery store, retail, etc. Many of them are also much, much taller which is very intimidating in its own way. I think if you took my class from the mid-90s and put them up against a typical high school class today, we would get destroyed in every single sport you could think of. On the other hand, I think on average we were a lot less overweight.
That said, I do perceive that young men today have a much more effeminate mental frame, but that can easily be explained by the drastically more effeminate social construct compared to 30 years ago. The difference in the social construct is so vast and undeniably more effeminate and there's no way a young person can grow up in that without it affecting him.
Then you have the circumstance where older generations needed to be more physical in terms of play, manual labor, etc. when young and that also exposes boys to a more masculine frame.
All that said I don't think it's a bad idea at all for young people to try to optimize hormones but I doubt that we quite know yet what we're doing. The first time I got my testosterone checked (a few years ago, so in my 40s) it was near 1200 ng/dL but you would never think that by looking at me. Other than my jawline and my politics you wouldn't surmise that I had high testosterone. So I think there is something much more to it. Maybe it's something about androgen receptors and transcription. I don't know what the best formula is. I've tried raw DHT powder and androsterone and didn't really notice anything of interest. If anything it just made me even more GABAergic.
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@Crypt-Keeper I know what you mean, however average testosterone levels really have fallen, along with other markers of masculinization, if you believe the research. I did a research project on it a few years ago: https://bioenergetic.forum/topic/470/testosterone-worldwide?_=1722348624010
Some of it is just obesity pulling the average down. But I have also seen a study that says test has fallen independent of obesity. I haven't fully gone through the data myself to look into that.
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Hairdut provided studies showing that transdermal DHEA, P4, and K2 applied to testicles (dissolved in DMSO/ethanol) is very effective at raising androgens. There’s even an individual on the RP forum who got his test into the 1000+ ng/dL range using that combo.
You could also look into the combination of oral DHEA and androsterone which again Haidut provides evidence for completely revitalizing castrated rats.
If you want to do an experiment with straight T/DHT, that will most likely work too and be very effective. I myself am going to do an experiment with t dissolved in tocopherols and taken orally. I think 5-10 mg/day dissolved in the vitamin E should have a very powerful effect, together with p4 since supplemental androgens can down regulate the enzymes that produce/convert other hormones into the precursor steroids.
If you don’t want to dissolve in tocopherols, I found a study showing that 200 mg T given as free crystals 2x/day was able to raise the T levels of Eunuchs to full normal levels for the entire day, and that was in the 70’s.
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DHT is considerably lower than it was in the 80's. Men averaged around 98 ng/dl in the 80's. Today the ranges is from 30-90 ng/dl.
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@risingfire Im starting to think lower DHT is the cause of feminine men and not testoserone.
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@PrinceTrebata agreed. It's the ultimate androgenic hormone
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@risingfire Makes me think about the saying that was widely believed that naturally bald men have higher androgens. And that would seem to explain why bald men have beautiful women. And why subsequently men shaving to become bald became a thing. And still does.
That is a perception I hold on to this day.
But I haven't really followed Danny Roddy and I really haven't kept up with the latest on baldness and its association to DHT.
Temporal thinking is the faculty that’s
engaged by an enriched environment, but it’s
wrong to call it “thinking,” because it’s simply
the way organisms exist... - Ray Peat Nov 2017 Newsletter -
Or maybe this was just a Hollywood chiseling and remolding and reshaping of our sexuality.
There! I fixed my spell check always intentionally changing my meaning. It just erased Hollywood from my sentence. I suspect AI bots at work.
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@yerrag I don't really believe most bald men have high dht. They most likely have higher estrogen, cortisol, adrenaline and prolactin.
Propecia takes destroys 5AR. I took and my DHT was pretty low for a long time. Hair has never grown back. Even when it was at the bottom of the range.
One thing to note. Most men didn't go bald until later in life. I read a stat where the mean DHT in 1981 was 98ng/dl. That's currently higher than the top of the range in 2024
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@risingfire I don't think so either. I've had thinning hair for a while now. I lose a lot of albumin in urine because albumin is constantly being used as an antioxidant to keep spillover ROS from destroying tissues, the spillover ROS from phagocytosis to deal with heavy metal toxicity. My liver, I think, has to divert sulfur needed for hair growth to replenish the albumin oxidized and excreted in urine.
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@yerrag have you gotten blood tests recently?
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@risingfire not plenty. just cbc esr. what do you have in mind?
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@yerrag beyond albumin I would suggest estrone, prolactin and dht
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@yerrag Not sure on if DHT causes baldness or not, or what hormonal imbalance can cause it as people age, but the the trifecta of male beauty is hair, good skin, and masculine features, i.e. jawline, cheekbones, browridge, hunter eyes. These masculine features are theoretically caused by DHT.
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The longer I stay, the more I learn from all of you. The trifecta sugar says has a lot of wisdom in how health is encapsulated in observable physical features. I see them as useful proxies for health than makes testing less of a necessity. I just say less necessary because there are many tests available and some are even impractical because they are nowhere to be found, and if you did find them, they are so specialized just making one strains your health budget for the year. And one is never enough.
The trifecta must imply that if you have all these conditions checked, a man would be physiologically masculine complete with androgens on their fullness, and that his penis is functionally optimal.
For that to be the case, one cannot but be metabolically optimal. Which means the body runs on mitochondrial respiration where it should, not just on sugar but on fats in the right mix. Where it shouldn't, such as the red blood cells that don't have mitochondria, it runs on glycolysis. Straying off is when the body makes do by relying on stress hormones to make up for straying.
Being nutritionally sufficient by eating macros centered on carbohydrates with adequate nutrients in the form of vitamins and minerals, with clean air, enough sunshine with its broad swath of beneficial frequencies. And being free from exposure to elements that harm such as toxins and pathogens. Having enough exercise that works the brain and muscles to develop. And having the intangibles that make life meaningful and worthwhile.
Being free from exposure is quite the challenge, as dictated by societal forces that present us with an ever-growing list of harmful substances and ideas that work to destroy the balance and the salutary equilibrium our body constantly works at optimizing. In the form of particles that persorb thru the guts, toxins injected thru mandates of vaccines,, in the form of food composed of PUFAs that are essential as cyanide, just to name a few. With the FDA acting with the AMA and the AHA, and the WHO, and with the moralizing participation of consumer advocacy groups, acting as false angels, such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI)- notorious for making McDonald's switch from beef tallow to PUFA to make French fries.
Without the above, we already have to deal with the endotoxins which Ray never stopped warning us about ad nauseum, and the periodontal toxins which the ADA pretend they have no power over, and the mercury toxicity they introduced into our bodies over more than a century of (dis)service. As if it wasn't enough that the medical establishment tolerate low-grade ( no fever) microbial infections in our internal constitution by defining infection as associated solely with fevers. Infections that are a chronic energy sink that divert energy towards constantly fighting them and robs energy that provide for optimizing our health.
I'm gonna just end for now. As this has become a diatribe of a rant. But I hope there is a point here. Which is that we are so distracted and discombobulated with the continual heavy assaults on our metabolism that we should step back and find ways to simplify things and get back to fighting these societal forces designed to weaken our innate abilities.
Sugar simplifies it rightly by using a trifecta of physically observable traits of male health. As we can end up being so in need of a technologically sophisticated biomarkers that make us paralyzed, thinking of them as a crutch we can't live without.
There are simpler ways to gauge our health that don't require the sophistication of a million dollar "world-class" lab.
Temporal thinking is the faculty that’s
engaged by an enriched environment, but it’s
wrong to call it “thinking,” because it’s simply
the way organisms exist... - Ray Peat Nov 2017 Newsletter -
My rejoinder to the previous post is to use, following the lead by Sugar to use trifectas, some biomarkers that you can use in the comfort of your home.
If optimal metabolism leads naturally to Sugar's trifecta, which kinda guarantees one is a desirable physically healthy male and mate and a good lynchpin of a strong society, what simple biometrics can one use to ensure one is metabolically optimal, dispensing with the tons of expensive tests the WHO and even this forum, is so addicted to?
First and foremost, it's acid base balance. Using just pH strip on urine and saliva, one can learn a lot about the body, with a bird's eyeview of a forest. Which is a lot better than just going into the trees directly without reconnoitering the forest or landscape. When you are always acidic anytime of the day, and daily, this chronic acidity may be part of why you have a high heart rate, or why kidneys lose their ability to filter well because of rhe internal calcification and fibrosis eventually sets in. But if anything else, it merits asking whether you are running on glycolysis which produces a lot of lactic acid and very little of CO2, which acts as a bugger to keep your acid base base balance in healthy limits.
Secondly, it's how well your blood sugar is regulated 24 hours a day. After a meal, in-between meals, when you are asleep, and even on a day fast or two, or three. How well it stays within say a narrow band of say between 80 and 100 (give or take) means your blood sugar does not yoyo between highs that cause it to plummet to hypoglycemic lows that affects how constant your supply of T³ is, whi h is dependent on having a constant supply of sugar. Furthermore, when your blood sugar is well absorbed by the tissues and is also well-metabolized, it says your body is making energy very well. As Ray would say, the body isn't constrained in using as much energy as it needs, as any extra it makes is well utilized to develop itself.
This is easy to test. I have a glucometer and I can test my blood sugar every hour or every half hour for 5 hours after taking 75g of glucose (after a 10 hrs fast) to plot my oral glucose tolerance curve and see how stable this curve is. This sure beats the useless HbA1c test used by doctors these days, which is only convenient but explains why our doctors cannot solve the overweight/obese epidemic, for lack of the right tools (as well as the principles we have learned from Ray).I don't have a third for the trifecta identified but there are some I am considering. It may be the absence of allergies, or strong immunity against respiratory diseases. But I agree with Ray about the faddish nature of using HRV as a measurement of health. Just because it is ubiquitous in the devices of Polar/Oura/Apple/Samsung doesn't mean they're in anyway useful. The only thing really going for HRV is tha notion that since NASA developed it for space use, it must be rocket science. You don't have understand whether it is just hokum or not, it is rocket science so it's okay if you don't understand it.
But those two (acid base balance and sugar regulation) alone used well are good takeoff points for further testing with more specialized tests. If these tests help with achieving Sugar's trifecta, and help with attaining optimal metabolic health, and I'm pretty confident they will, then we have cut the chase and simplified the journey to health.
I would qualify more my ideas, but I would just discuss more when there is enough discussion to merit that. Otherwise, I would just be jumping the gun.
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@risingfire said in The Testosterone/DHT Conspiracy:
@yerrag beyond albumin I would suggest estrone, prolactin and dht
Might be low dht, but less likely high estrone or prolactin. As my good metabolism (supported by good sugar regulation and good acid base balance, no allergies, great immune resistance, normal weighted essential despite not having an active sports or workout lifestyle while eating 3 full carb loaded meals a day) precludes having high estrone or prolactin.
But my high blood pressure condition also points toward my body adapting my blood pressure to provide just enough pressure to provide adequate perfusion to my organs to protect them from degeneration. This pressure is not enough though, to fully feed the capillaries of my scalp adequately to maintain a lush hair cover. There is still enough hair though to not be bald.
The body simply know having lush hair is not as important as keeping my organs. It probably thinks keeping my virility at its highest is not as important as well.
I may have enough androgens but not enough microcirculstion for my hair to be as full.
