In the world of fitness supplements, the fine line between a stern warning and an outright ban is the accumulation of a serious body count. Without the offending drug or hormone presenting a grave danger, everything is fair game, and the mere fact that an herb or drug might make someone bigger, stronger or faster may trigger a ban from the governing body of a sports league, but it will probably fail to elevate a supplement to the level of a purchasing ban.
As such, there are several supplements that the Food and Drug Administration has published some strong opinions about, but has opted not to do anything to influence the legality of. This means that if you want to bully your local softball league with a reign of chemical-fueled terror that would cause the computers of the World Anti-Doping Agency to light up like a Christmas tree, you have the legal right to do so. To that end, here are five supplements you can easily purchase on Amazon right now that should probably be illegal…
When is a steroid apparently not a steroid? When it’s dehydroepiandrosterone, more commonly known as DHEA. There was little ambiguity about DHEA’s status as a problematic steroid back in the mid-1980s when the FDA began cracking down on it. At the time, it was primarily being marketed as an over-the-counter weight-loss supplement and sex-life enhancer. An FDA-enforced ban went into effect in 1985, but it remained available with a prescription for several years as scientists continued to test it. Apparently, they had fallen in love with this unique steroid, which was capable of being extracted from ordinary human urine.
So how did DHEA eventually become the only steroid available for purchase without a prescription? Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, who successfully pushed to spare DHEA from an all-encompassing steroid ban, declaring that DHEA was entitled to a special exemption as an anti-aging drug. Suspiciously, Hatch’s son was a lobbyist for the National Nutritional Foods Association, which represented the manufacturer of DHEA.
In practice, DHEA behaves in a similar muscle-growing manner to most prohibited steroids. This also means DHEA comes with all of the ordinary side effects associated with steroid use, including the onset of psychiatric disorders and a worsening of existing preexisting mental disorders, along with the usual suspects like oily skin, acne and unwanted hair growth.
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Hydroxycitrate, aka Garcinia Cambogia
Although the FDA banned ephedra in the mid-2000s, none of the major supplement manufacturers were in any rush to watch their revenue streams slip away. So instead, they hurried to find a suitable replacement that would enable them to keep their fat-burning supplements on the market in a controversy-free form.
Hydroxycitrate — the active ingredient in the herbal remedy garcinia cambogia — emerged as the immediate successor to ephedra. Hydroxycitrate had been in popular use since the mid-1990s when Utah-based company Neways introduced it as the active ingredient in Thinyu, a supplement that would supposedly eliminate the fat from digested food preemptively. While some studies conducted with hydroxycitrate demonstrated its potential to inhibit the accumulation of body fat, that was small consolation to the people whose livers suffered irreparable harm as a consequence of ingesting these reformulated fat burners, and a new version of Hydroxycut in particular.