Ep. #834: Is Turkesterone a Safe and Effective “Natural Steroid”?

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 terone, which is something I’ve been getting asked about a lot over the last couple of months, along with t R T. That’s probably gonna be my next monologue. And peptides, I’ve been getting asked a lot about those as well. So that’ll probably follow t r t. But today we’re talking about Queone, which some people are claiming.

Is a natural steroid, a natural safe steroid. That’s how people who are selling terone are, 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 terone?

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.

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Skedaddle on over to there. Save big hurry up though because no matter what my exorbitant E R P software predicts, we always run out of stock of at least a thing or two every year During our big Sitewide sales, especially our Black Friday sale, there’s always. That flavor, or two or three or that product, or two or three, that just blows up out of nowhere.

So that means that your favorite flavors or products may or may not survive the onslaught. Do not risk such a calamity. Instead. Head over to by legion.com now and claim your discount and bask in the post-purchase. Okay, so what is terone? Well, Terone is an ETA steroid, 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, uh, deeper voice and strength and so forth.

But, ETA steroids are produced by plants and fungi, and there are two types of ETA steroids. There are zoo, it’s, I couldn’t find the pronunciation online. It’s probably Zuo ETA steroids. Z O O ETA Steroids or just. Zoo Ecto steroids. That sounds wrong to me, but again, I couldn’t find a pronunciation online.

And phyto ecto steroids. So Zuo ecto steroids, I’m just gonna 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, Heta steroids, 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 phyto ETA steroids, they may prematurely molt lose weight or suffer other metabolic damage and then die. So Terone is, Phyto Ecto steroids. And recently, over the last six months or so, Terone 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. Many of the companies selling Terone 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 increased muscle fiber size and enhanced fiscal.

Formants and improved general wellbeing, increased appetite, improved digestion, uh, improved glucose sensitivity and utilization. I mean, this is a long list and I could cite studies. If I wanted to sell U terone, I could cite studies for all of this. Lowering cholesterol relieving osteoporosis, enhancing wound healing, um, producing anti-inflammatory.

Effects in the body and all of that sounds great and is used to sell a lot 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 those things you’d realize. 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 we 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. Because something does something in rats or other animals, that it will probably do the same thing in humans and in the case of Terone and other phyto steroids, there is very little human research.

Now one study that Terone boosters love to refer to as proof that the pudding is as good as they say it is. It actually didn’t look at Terone. It studied eOne, which is a, a similar ecto steroid. And in this study, which was conducted by scientists at German Sport University, Colon, 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 a of ExOne per day, and they lifted weights three days per week. And then you had a high dose group, 800 MIGS of ExOne per day.

Three days of weightlifting per week, and then a control group who took two 100 milligram pills of ExOne 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. 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 terone. 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. People taking the ExOne. Those guys, they lost almost a pound of muscle, whereas the group that took 200 milligrams of ExOne and just sat on their butts the whole time, gained about a half a pound of muscle on average.

And, you know, there’s, there’s a word for that. It’s called suspicious. Somehow we are to believe that simply taking the ExOne 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, uh, afterward the analysis was done. It showed that although the label on the bottle of the ExOne pills said each pill contained a hundred milligrams of the stuff, they really only had six milligrams per pill.

So that means that. High dose group took a tiny amount of ione 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 eOne 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 ecto steroids, these phyto steroids, we just don’t know much about how they work, what they do in the body, both good and bad. Now, recent research has. Uh, 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, Uh, I was wrong about ecto steroids 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 uh, then I’ll be. . 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.

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 ecto steroid 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 ecto steroid than the labels claimed.

And in six cases, the actual amount was found. Less than 20% of what was reported on the labels. And so if you are buying something like terone, 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 terone 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.

Uh, 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 ETA steroid, 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 Terone 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 in your own hands, so to speak. Not that I would expect major unwanted side effects from Terone, but again, you don’t know what you’re getting when you buy terone unless you are going to send it off to a lab for analysis for not only ter.

Content, but also contaminants, stuff you wouldn’t want in there. Like androgens and I, I’ll say that even if you know somebody, let’s say who sells orone and you trust this person, understand that they could be getting hosed by their supplier. For example, my sports nutrition company, Legion gets contact.

All the time by ingredient suppliers for, 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, and other ingredients I use a lot of in, uh, cut it.

Cut those costs at least in. 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, uh, 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. Uh, take beta alanine. A good example of this beta alanine is beta alanine. Mm, 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 probably low quality beta alanine. Now, I understand some people don’t get any tingles from beta alanine, but most of us do, and if you are a person. The tingles from Beta Alanine, if you use Pulse, my 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, uh, source ingredients. So anyway, all of that is to say that somebody can want to make an honest Terone 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.

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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.