alcohol boosts testosterone

Bigger Stronger Leaner Competitive Bodybuilding
1

The following article is in the july isuue of MUSCLE RX:

Scripps research institute scientists found that alcohol caused a rapid spike in brain and blood testosterone in rats. The research could explain the aggressive and sexual feeling of men and women after drinking. Drinking often trigger violence an dcreased sexual behavior, both of which are associated with higher testosterone levels. However excessive alcohol intake depresses testosterone and will impair sexual performance. THE TAKE HOME MESSAGE IS THAT A LITTLE ALCOHOL IS GOOD FOR BOOSTING TESTOSTERONE but too much has the opposite effect.

I thought that any amount of alcohol decreases test level.
comments anyone?

2

I think that article is swimming in bullshit. DECREASED sexual behavior is a symptom of INCREASED T?

DI

3

I recall once study T-mag wrote about that showed violent prisoners tended to have low T levels.

I think the study you wrote about just goes to show that you can find studies that point in either direction, regardless of topic.

4

Now is that why Patricia and Ko are so strong is because they drink Beer? I think thats my missing link…:wink:

5

It’s called cross-expression. Women will express more testosterone when consuming alcohol, and men will express estrogen. It’s been know for awhile that this is true, so I think this joker magazine is simply trying to raise some eyebrows of the retarded muscleheads out there. “Dude, lets get loaded, and just get fucking the weights. rar!”

Whatever,
Landon

6

I watched the news yesterday and there was a segment on women and drinking. The gist of the segment said that Women who drink an average of two drinks a day have a 40 percent decreased risk of adult onset diabetes. Weight apparantly was not a factor.

I’d sincerely question these ‘studies’ as they seem to go against the grain of common sense.

My wife had a statistic somewhere that correlated murder with increased ice cream sales. Now, while it may be true that murders do occur more often when sales of ice cream are higher, is there really a correlation, or is it statistical bullshit?

7

Well i guess i’ll have to go drink more guinness. Damn i’m easily convinced…
Guinness for strength (as they say)

8

Those statistics are interesting, but like all statistics, they are also irrelevant…

9

Thank God.

10

I’m with Landon on this one. Everything I have ever read ecos his statements. While in fact both men and women tend to get more sexually excited comsuming minimal amounts of alcohol it has been proven that it is women who’s test levels spike greatly and not men. Also, take a look at “Your Doctor Your Dealer” or “Legal Test” for T-Mags take on the subject. One of those two articles suggests drinking excessive amounts of alcohol prior to a t-test to fool the Doc into thinking you having abnormally low t-levels. Generally as far as testosterone goes, foreign substances tend to lower t while elevating estrogen levels.

11

Harkonnen,

That was by far one of the most funny and true things I ever read. Thanks

12

thanks for the comment
good point RS: I should thought of alchol increasint T for women.

13

I’ll drink to that :-))

14

Hell yes, I’ve found drinking and fucking to be very rewarding and science be damned I intend to keep both up. 6:30 a.m. 4 days a week I am in the gym, and I intend to keep that up too. No point in being the biggest strongest guy on the beach if I’m also the one who runs home to bed before the fun really kicks in…at least that’s my opinion. 43 yoa, years of training.

15

re: the murder with icecream sales

It was actually deaths and icecream sales if I’m not mistaken. You see over the summer people eat more icecream right? And they also swim more. Therefore, more people drown in the summer just because the more people swim the more of a chance of drowning. People, when something is CORRELATED it doesn’t mean CAUSE and EFFECT. Replace the word correlated with “associated with”.

Statistics can give you some bullshit answers, for instance there was another study of drunk driving accidents on the weekends. It said somethink like 42% of all drunk driving accidents occur on Friday, Sat and Sunday. If you divide 3 by 7 (the days of the week) you get this magic number. What a fucking revelation!

16

Here’s the original study, for what it’s worth. By the way, these rats were good and liquored-up (dose was 2 g of alcohol per kg body weight…that would be about 15 beers for a 200 lb dude). The study only lists the results at 30 minutes after the dose. I suspect there would be a huge drop below baseline sometime later, but that’s just a wild guess.

Acutely administered ethanol participates in testosterone synthesis and increases testosterone in rat brain.

Alcohol Clin Exp Res 2003 Jan;27(1):38-43 (ISSN: 0145-6008)

Alomary AA; Vallee M; O’Dell LE; Koob GF; Purdy RH; Fitzgerald RL
Department of Neuropharmacology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California 92037, USA.

BACKGROUND: The interaction of alcohol and testosterone has long been of interest, mainly due to the effect of alcohol on aggression and sexual behavior. To date, there have been very few, if any, studies examining the effect of acute alcohol administration on testosterone concentrations in the brain. The administration of 1,1-dideuteroethanol ([1,1-2H2]ethanol) provided the opportunity to trace the deuterium label into newly synthesized deuterotestosterone in brain samples to determine whether ethanol oxidation was directly linked to testosterone synthesis.

METHODS: Unoperated and adrenalectomized-gonadectomized (ADX/GDX) rats were given either ethanol or [1,1-2H2]ethanol in a single intraperitoneal dose of 2 g/kg body weight. We used gas chromatography/mass spectrometry to accurately determine both the amount of steroids present and the degree of deuterium incorporation into specific steroids isolated from brain samples.

RESULTS: Thirty minutes after alcohol administration, the level of total testosterone increased 4-fold in the frontal cortex and 3-fold in the plasma of unoperated male Wistar rats. The relative increase in the abundance of monodeuterated testosterone 30 min after [1,1-2H2]ethanol administration was significant (p < 0.05) in both brain and plasma. ADX/GDX animals treated with alcohol had testosterone concentrations that were 5% of those found in unoperated animals dosed with ethanol.

CONCLUSIONS: Acutely administered ethanol increased brain concentrations of testosterone 4-fold in male Wistar rats. ADX/GDX surgery reduced brain concentrations of testosterone in response to alcohol by 95%. The deuterium labeling of testosterone after [1,1-2H2]ethanol showed that ethanol oxidation is directly linked to testosterone biosynthesis and that the deuterium-labeled testosterone is present in the central nervous system. These results demonstrate that peripherally administered ethanol directly contributes to the concentrations of testosterone in the central nervous system and that the testosterone found in brain samples is primarily synthesized in the periphery. These findings may be important for understanding the behavioral changes associated with acute alcohol consumption.

17

Here’s another study that found the exact opposite results (lowered T with the same dose of alcohol):

Alcohol rapidly lowers plasma testosterone levels in the rat: evidence that a neural brain-gonadal pathway may be important for decreased testicular responsiveness to gonadotropin.
Alcohol Clin Exp Res 1999 Jan;23(1):38-45 (ISSN: 0145-6008)
Rivier C
Clayton Foundation Laboratories for Peptide Biology, The Salk Institute, La Jolla, California 92037, USA.
Alcohol is reported to suppress testosterone (T) secretion in the adult male rat. Decreases in the circulating levels of luteinizing hormone (LH) and/or the activity of testicular steroidogenic enzymes have been proposed as putative mechanisms underlying this inhibitory effect. We have recently provided functional evidence for a neural pathway between the brain and the male gonads that plays an important role in the ability of brain proinflammatory cytokines to blunt testicular responsiveness to human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). The present work was designed to test the hypothesis that a similar pathway might be implicated in the inhibitory influence of alcohol on T secretion. Alcohol, administered intraperitoneally or intragastrically, significantly prevented the T response to the gonadotropin. This effect was significant within 15 min of drug treatment. In the intragastric model (the only one used for this type of experiment), the effect of alcohol was not altered by prior blockade of LH release, which suggests that it is independent of changes in the activity of the pituitary gonadotrophs. The lowest effective dose of alcohol, delivered intraperitoneally, was 2.0 g/kg. The intracerebroventricular injection of the alpha- and beta-adrenergic receptor antagonists phentolamine and propranolol significantly reversed the inhibitory influence of alcohol when it was administered 15 min, but not 60 min, before hCG. Collectively, our results indicate that (1) alcohol induces a rapid and profound decrease in plasma T levels that is secondary to decreased testicular responsiveness to hCG; and (2) at least part of this acute inhibitory action of alcohol may depend on the activation of a neural, adrenergic-dependent pathway between the brain and the testes.

18

At least it explains why arnold was so buff, he used to drink beer after his workouts! hehe

19

On the ice cream and murders/rapes/whatever violent crime you want…

My psych professor offered the same question to us saying “Why does rape and other violent crimes go up as the sales of ice cream goes up?” The answer–Because of the temperature.

20

There is a bid difference between a temporary spike in Test, and the aftermath of drinking, where alcohol causes T-levels to plummet and remain depressed during sleep.

So if you want high overall levels of T - don’t drink.