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Dan Duchaine: RAW and UNCENSORED
by: The Sandwich (April '98 IRONMAN)
The following interview in no way reflects the beliefs and opinions of IRONMAN magazine. By agreement with the author, we present the interview with very few changes; however, we did have to edit some things out on advice from our attorney. (For an unedited audiotape of the entire interview, see the Editor’s Note at the end of this article). IRONMAN relinquishes any liability regarding hearsay and rumor presented and does not condone the use of illegal drugs. We choose to print the following because much of the information is pertinent to bodybuilding and shows insight into the reality of the sport. IRONMAN is an open forum.
I’m fat, 20 years old, and I’ve never been laid. My life sucks, and I hate to work out, so I’m really lazy and miserable. One of the few things that can cheer me up, however, is talking to bodybuilding icon Dan Duchaine. Dan is honest—brutally so. If you ask him something, he’ll give you a totally unrehearsed answer. He doesn’t pull punches; he throws them! If you want the unbiased truth about bodybuilding, drugs, supplements and training, look no further than guru Dan Duchaine.
The following interview is raw and totally uncensored, so before you read it, lock your doors, put the kids to sleep and hold on tight.
TS: I want to start off by getting some information on your new newsletter, Dirty Dieting. It’s pretty interesting and hardcore. What prompted you to do it?
DD: I promised people who bought my book Body Opus that there would be a follow-up newsletter because the book was written quite some time ago, while I was locked away in prison. I think I finished writing it in 1993, and here it is 1997. I don’t want to keep updating the book, so a newsletter is a better way. Plus, I was hoping we would make some nice money on the newsletter because usually, if you do it right, you can make more money than you can by selling magazines. But that isn’t the case with this newsletter. It’s at best break even and maybe in the red a little bit this year. Hopefully in ’98 we’ll do better. [To subscribe to Dirty Dieting, call 1-500-367-4531.]
TS: This newsletter seems to be a lot more hardcore than Muscle Media, the magazine you write for now. Is there a reason you strayed from Muscle Media, or did you want your own forum?
DD: Not my decision. Muscle Media isn’t a hardcore magazine anymore and never will be. I mean, they’ve really sold out, and they don’t want any drug or steroid articles in the magazine whatsoever.
TS: Wow! That was their claim to fame. What happened?
DD: [Nervous] You’ll have to ask someone other than me. I have no idea. Obviously—unless they have an agenda I’m not aware of—the point of changing a magazine is to increase the readership and eventually sell more supplements. My gut feeling is it’s not working, but I could be wrong because I haven’t seen sales figures. I’ve heard a lot of disgruntled people, but that’s just the kind of people I hang out with, ya know?
But remember, those kind of people, the hardcore, are a pretty minor audience. I guess the rationale is that whatever subscribers they lose in the process will be offset by new subscribers or readers.
TS: Since you started writing about it, DNP [dinitrophenol] has certainly become one of the hottest and most-talked-about drugs. You’ve mentioned that it can almost double metabolic rate and help people drop bodyfat like mad. What else can you tell us about this chemical, and are any of the top bodybuilders using it?
DD: I don’t know. I haven’t worked with any top bodybuilders, and I didn’t really want to. I used some amateurs and some willing participants simply because even though you think you know everything there is to know about something, you really don’t know until you actually work on it with a whole bunch of people. I also hired a research assistant over the summer to pull research on DNP—stuff that wasn’t available at the medical libraries here. So I got research back to 1932, when everything started. I learned quite a bit from reading the new—well, old—research we pulled, and I think we can do a better job with DNP with much less discomfort than people were having before.
TS: What should they do differently?
DD: DNP doesn’t act like ephedrine or clenbuterol, [with which] you can really chart how well the drug is working with your body temperature, because with DNP there’s a lot of regulation that the body does between increasing heart rate, skin dilation and respiration. Even though you feel warm, your thermometer won’t register a change because heat is being dissipated so swiftly. The problem is, just because you could tolerate something like 100 degrees or so doesn’t mean you’d want to. That’s an indicator that you’ve almost doubled your metabolic rate, and that’s getting in the danger zone. It’s not so much that the heat is going to do you in; it’s just that the low amount of ATP in the cell could really hurt you.
TS: Could you take some type of coenzyme like pyruvate to boost the ATP levels in the liver?
DD: Yes, you could do that; however, there’s a decrease of thyroid in the body after the first 48 hours of using DNP. Part of it has to do with ATP depletion in the liver, but the DNP also allows most of the thyroid to be unbound—the T4—so it’s excreted faster out of the body. So even though your TSH and your thyroid output are normal, you’re not getting as much thyroid available in the body because it’s shunted out. That’s why after 48 hours you’ll see a slight decrease in body temperature that you should restore by using Cytomel.
TS: What’s a safe dosage of DNP?
DD: Because you can double your metabolic rate, most people lose the weight so fast, they end up eating these amazing amounts of calories to keep up with the burning off; that’s when you’re using about seven or eight milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight. I think if you keep it to three or four milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight, you’ll be much more comfortable. You might be warm but not unusually so, and you won’t be sweating heavily. And eventually you’ll lose as much bodyfat as you want, even with no calorie restriction.
TS: Wow! No calorie restriction? Sounds good to me. But is this stuff dangerous in the long term as far as cancer—with DNP being a phenol and all?
DD: No. Well, that’s odd because someone mentioned in one of the discussion groups that all phenols in general are carcinogenic and mutogenic, but I’m not quite sure if that’s true because none of the research shows any kind of tumor acceleration or cancer growth. Even the cataract problem that surfaced all of a sudden in the mid-1930s—exclusively in women, for some odd reason—was due to a depletion of vitamin C and glutathione in the eyeball. Just two weeks ago on the news they were talking about cataracts and old age and how individuals should be using more vitamin C. So perhaps the whole cataract issue…can be avoided by taking more antioxidants.
TS: You’ve said that you tried DNP about a year ago. Have you noticed any side effects now that you’ve had time to reflect?
DD: No, just that I probably dropped the weight too fast. There are a few things I learned about DNP afterward, through the research. It mentions that some individuals, when they’re on DNP for weeks at a time, stop losing bodyweight. The scale didn’t seem to budge, even though the scientists were measuring an elevated metabolic rate from oxygen burning. And they figured out that the body, in some strange way, was holding water. Once the subjects stopped taking DNP, most of it was flushed out with more urination. So you might be doing DNP and not show any weight loss, but when you come off it, suddenly you lose five pounds over three or four days from water [excretion].
TS: You’ve also written about a natural substance that may be as effective as DNP for fat loss. Can you give us more information on that?
DD: I have two sources, one of which I had to dig for at the UCLA [University of California at Los Angeles] medical library. It was very early [research]. One was purified extract of blowfly thoraxes [laughs]. The other might be an herbal substance that has some kind of fermentation, but I’ll have a better answer in another week or so when I find out what the compound is. I have the name of it, and I’ve done an Internet search, but I can’t find out what it is.
TS: So you think this might be a safe alternative to DNP?
DD: Um, I don’t think it’s necessarily safe, but it’s legal for interstate shipment.
TS: IGF-1. Are any of the top bodybuilders using it, and if so, how much? I heard [one pro] was I.V.ing the stuff.
DD: Well, I.V. would be the way to do it, just like growth hormone. But I’m not sure. It used to be a little easier to get a few years ago because Gro-Pep had an outlet in Utah. Now you have to get it from Australia direct. I don’t know. I assume some of [the pros] are still using it. I would estimate the dosage to be no more than 50 micrograms every time. That’s an odd circumstance because the human trials were done in milligrams per day, so it’s hard to believe that micrograms would have an effect, but who knows?
TS: Synthol [the compound you can inject directly into the muscle to make it swell] seems to be all the rage among top pro and amateur bodybuilders.
DD: Yeah, that’s odd because I haven’t seen the Olympia pictures yet, but I’m wondering which bodybuilder at the Olympia had remarkably bigger bodyparts this year as opposed to last.
TS: Do you think it’s safe in the long term?
DD: No, I don’t. But I can’t tell why it’s going to be unsafe. My gut feeling is that something bad is going to happen. I have a feeling the reason the oil doesn’t dissipate is somehow…. It’s hard to believe that an oil would stay in an area for months at a time unless there is some kind of collagen encapsulation going on, where the body is protecting itself from the substance. It would be just like a breast implant—smooth ones that don’t have the ripples and [contain] collagen.
TS: I remember you once said that injecting small amounts of silicone into the muscles would give a similar effect.
DD: I would sooner do that than I’d do Synthol.
TS: Didn’t bodybuilders in the ’70s do something like that?
DD: I broached this subject with two plastic surgeons, and Bruce Nadler [a plastic surgeon in the New York area] told me step by step how one could do this safely. And then my plastic surgeon in Los Angeles, who is into historical procedures, looked around in the literature and even asked a few old-time plastic surgeons, and they haven’t said anything about it. But it seems to me that it did happen.
TS: Hmm, so this might be better than injecting Synthol?
DD: Well, you know, although they have problems with direct injections of silicone, they’ve used silicone for decades to fluff up pock marks on surface skin, and that’s the same procedure. As long as it’s small, it’s going to encapsulate, and I don’t think it’s going to move.
TS: Let’s move on to something else. You’ve written about a new veterinary vaccine that may be beneficial to bodybuilders. Can you elaborate?
DD: Nope, I just got a little blurb on it off something, and I never really pursued it. I should, though, because all [the researchers] could say is what it did well, but since it’s for animals they didn’t say what it did that was bad for you. It must somehow affect insulin—either secretion or sensitivity.
TS: So what does it do exactly?
DD: Well, there’s anti-hormones that can slow down the pulse rate of growth hormone coming out of the pituitary, and I think that’s how it works. I don’t think it blocks so much the action of growth hormone; it just doesn’t allow the growth hormone to pulse out as well as it should.
TS: Speaking of growth hormone, Muscle Media has hinted that they have a growth-hormone-releasing compound that can be sold as a dietary supplement. Do you know anything about that?
DD: I think that’s foo-foo bunk. They don’t have it. If they did, they’d release it, and even if they did, it hasn’t been researched. EAS [which is owned by Bill Phillips, who also publishes Muscle Media] would never sell something like that. They’re too mainstream.
TS: Do you have any idea what they’re talking about?
DD: Obviously it must be some kind of protein that’s cleaved down into a peptide short enough to mimic that chain of releasing hormone.
TS: What about So Cal’s liquid creatine, Turbo Blast 600? Evidently, they’re saying this stuff is 600 percent more effective than regular powdered creatine. Is that true, and could it be something beneficial for most bodybuilders?
DD: The concept is good. The So Cal stuff is probably creatine with propylene glycol, and, yeah, it’s okay, but it’s expensive. You could just use six times the amount of powdered creatine from another source and get the same effect. But if you have a problem with gastric upset or diarrhea or just don’t want to do lukewarm creatine, maybe this is an alternative.
TS: Do you think their claims match up to their products?
DD: You have to realize that the only way you sell supplements in this industry as a newcomer is with hype. Basically, everybody has the same products, and you can either be an established company, like Twinlab, and the prestige somehow gets the product sold, or you can sell a product with hype. But if it doesn’t work, people aren’t going to keep buying it. MuscleTech went from nowhere to a major company just from hype and hammering away with advertising. [James] Bradshaw and [John] Cribbs [of So Cal] realize hype works, and they will do as much as they can without breaking laws.
TS: Without a doubt androstenedione is the hottest supplement on the market right now, and I’m sure the readers would like to know a little more about it, what it can do and the optimal dosage. I’ve been using 400 milligrams a half hour before my workout, and I’ve been getting pretty good results. Is that a proper dosage?
DD: It depends on what your liver can do with it. Women do a much better job of converting androstenedione to testosterone.
TS: Why? Higher estrogen levels?
DD: Well, you’re close. They have progesterone, and men don’t. You have to realize that progesterone both lowers estrogen and increases 17-beta hydroxy dehydrogenase, the major steroid enzyme that converts androstenedione to testosterone. Men don’t have much because they don’t have any progesterone. You can get around that by using some progesterone cream, and that would improve the conversion rate. You could probably take about 100 milligrams of pregnenolone along with your androstenedione, and that would be rapidly converted to progesterone.
TS: What about the other androstenedione derivatives, such as—
DD: Androdiol or the nor version?
TS: Both.
DD: Not too many companies have the nor version; I think its kind of expensive. It’s around $1,500 a kilo. It shouldn’t be much better, but the people who are using it are raving about it, so we’ll see.
The androdiol is quite potent. It’s a different enzyme conversion—it’s 3-beta rather than 17-beta. It’s a good androgen, so it’s converted right in the blood. It’s about three times testosterone more per milligram [than androstenedione], converted. I’m not sure if it’s exactly legal, but it can’t be that illegal because it’s in the same category as DHEA, I guess.
TS: Is this stuff dangerous?
DD: Quite androgenic. Even before it’s converted, it’s very androgenic, and some studies pointed out that it’s even more androgenic than testosterone.
TS: Couldn’t you take an anti-aromatase, like chrysin?
DD: Yeah, Osmo has a few hundred kilos coming in at a very attractive price. The thing is, since no one has really used it in humans, we’re just estimating that you need two grams. Of course, there is always the cheap idiot who only uses a little and then says, “Oh, this stuff doesn’t work.”
TS: Mwahaha. Yeah, I know what you mean. Let’s move on to steroids. What would be the ideal steroid dosage for, say, a bodybuilder who has never used them before? The general consensus is that a bodybuilder’s first cycle is the most effective.
DD: I don’t know. I haven’t used steroids for so long, it’s hard to say. In the old days we used much higher dosages—10 Dianabol a day and 400 to 600 milligrams of Deca-Durabolin every week. People think that’s a high dosage, but that was a starting dose 10 years ago.
TS: So there really is no answer.
DD: There are two answers. One is that you can only get so much anabolic effect from…. If they stick around for weeks at a time or 12 hours at a time, like orals, studies state that’s not the way your body pulsates steroids. So you have so much anabolic activity through the receptor, but some steroids, above a certain dosage, cause additional anabolic effects outside the receptor. The problem is, the type of steroids and the dosages with which this happens are extreme. The novice steroid user maybe wouldn’t want to ethically, morally or personally consider—or even financially—doing four grams a week, the dosage at which a lot of people say the magic begins to happen. You have Milos [Sarcev] going from 210 to 250, you know?
TS: I heard that was mostly insulin.
DD: You can tell that. Just shake hands. If they’re big and squishy and watery, then [the person is] on insulin and growth hormone.
TS: Let’s talk about pro bodybuilding for a second. If you look at pictures of bodybuilding contests from the late ’80s and compare them to the physiques of today, there’s a remarkable difference. Is the change mostly chemical?
DD: Yep. It also might be…. Whenever you get fat in the off-season and then diet it off, the muscle comes off too. These people are much leaner off-season than they ever used to be.
TS: So mostly that would be clenbuterol, insulin and growth hormone.
DD: Yes, plus back then they relied on a lot of really weak anabolics [because] they thought the precision and the exotic nature of them made them better, but because the availability isn’t there anymore, they’re falling back on the more androgenic steroids that happen to be more anabolic at the same time.
TS: Is it safe for a recreational bodybuilder to inject insulin—in the long and short term?
DD: Depends on how much. If they’re only talking about the old one I.U. per 15 pounds of bodyweight maybe once a day, then that’s okay. You’re not going to wreck your pancreas by injecting insulin, but you will wreck your insulin sensitivity. Hopefully, that will go back to normal. Maybe in a young person that would happen. I’m a little concerned with high-level insulin use in middle-aged people. One of the big parts of aging is a lowered insulin sensitivity. Most old people are borderline type-2 diabetics.
TS: Couldn’t you take Glucophage or Phenformin to help increase insulin sensitivity?
DD: You could probably do that, although Metformin hasn’t had much success. There are other things coming. The new research [points to] beta-3 agonists as being ideal because you get both insulin secretion and insulin-receptor uptake.
TS: Isn’t that herbal stuff Synephrine a beta-3 agonist?
DD: Even ephedrine has some beta-3 action. I don’t know about the other one you mentioned. There’s not much brown fat on most non-northern latitude adults, so I don’t think it’s much of an issue.
TS: So if a bodybuilder was using insulin once a day, how long should he or she stay on it?
DD: When you first start using insulin, if you don’t eat anything after the first hour and a half, you start getting shaky, but after a while at the same dosage you won’t. That means your blood sugar is maintaining itself, which means your cells aren’t accepting the insulin.
I have a friend who’s doing a very interesting experiment. He’s using moderate amounts of insulin and eating no carbs at all during the day. He eats so much protein that whatever glucose he needs, his body converts it from amino acids.
TS: So insulin isn’t all that dangerous if you use small amounts for short periods?
DD: Oh, you should be all right—unless you’re one of the unlucky people who get fat under their stomach from it.
by: The Sandwich (April '98 IRONMAN)
The following interview in no way reflects the beliefs and opinions of IRONMAN magazine. By agreement with the author, we present the interview with very few changes; however, we did have to edit some things out on advice from our attorney. (For an unedited audiotape of the entire interview, see the Editor’s Note at the end of this article). IRONMAN relinquishes any liability regarding hearsay and rumor presented and does not condone the use of illegal drugs. We choose to print the following because much of the information is pertinent to bodybuilding and shows insight into the reality of the sport. IRONMAN is an open forum.
I’m fat, 20 years old, and I’ve never been laid. My life sucks, and I hate to work out, so I’m really lazy and miserable. One of the few things that can cheer me up, however, is talking to bodybuilding icon Dan Duchaine. Dan is honest—brutally so. If you ask him something, he’ll give you a totally unrehearsed answer. He doesn’t pull punches; he throws them! If you want the unbiased truth about bodybuilding, drugs, supplements and training, look no further than guru Dan Duchaine.
The following interview is raw and totally uncensored, so before you read it, lock your doors, put the kids to sleep and hold on tight.
TS: I want to start off by getting some information on your new newsletter, Dirty Dieting. It’s pretty interesting and hardcore. What prompted you to do it?
DD: I promised people who bought my book Body Opus that there would be a follow-up newsletter because the book was written quite some time ago, while I was locked away in prison. I think I finished writing it in 1993, and here it is 1997. I don’t want to keep updating the book, so a newsletter is a better way. Plus, I was hoping we would make some nice money on the newsletter because usually, if you do it right, you can make more money than you can by selling magazines. But that isn’t the case with this newsletter. It’s at best break even and maybe in the red a little bit this year. Hopefully in ’98 we’ll do better. [To subscribe to Dirty Dieting, call 1-500-367-4531.]
TS: This newsletter seems to be a lot more hardcore than Muscle Media, the magazine you write for now. Is there a reason you strayed from Muscle Media, or did you want your own forum?
DD: Not my decision. Muscle Media isn’t a hardcore magazine anymore and never will be. I mean, they’ve really sold out, and they don’t want any drug or steroid articles in the magazine whatsoever.
TS: Wow! That was their claim to fame. What happened?
DD: [Nervous] You’ll have to ask someone other than me. I have no idea. Obviously—unless they have an agenda I’m not aware of—the point of changing a magazine is to increase the readership and eventually sell more supplements. My gut feeling is it’s not working, but I could be wrong because I haven’t seen sales figures. I’ve heard a lot of disgruntled people, but that’s just the kind of people I hang out with, ya know?
But remember, those kind of people, the hardcore, are a pretty minor audience. I guess the rationale is that whatever subscribers they lose in the process will be offset by new subscribers or readers.
TS: Since you started writing about it, DNP [dinitrophenol] has certainly become one of the hottest and most-talked-about drugs. You’ve mentioned that it can almost double metabolic rate and help people drop bodyfat like mad. What else can you tell us about this chemical, and are any of the top bodybuilders using it?
DD: I don’t know. I haven’t worked with any top bodybuilders, and I didn’t really want to. I used some amateurs and some willing participants simply because even though you think you know everything there is to know about something, you really don’t know until you actually work on it with a whole bunch of people. I also hired a research assistant over the summer to pull research on DNP—stuff that wasn’t available at the medical libraries here. So I got research back to 1932, when everything started. I learned quite a bit from reading the new—well, old—research we pulled, and I think we can do a better job with DNP with much less discomfort than people were having before.
TS: What should they do differently?
DD: DNP doesn’t act like ephedrine or clenbuterol, [with which] you can really chart how well the drug is working with your body temperature, because with DNP there’s a lot of regulation that the body does between increasing heart rate, skin dilation and respiration. Even though you feel warm, your thermometer won’t register a change because heat is being dissipated so swiftly. The problem is, just because you could tolerate something like 100 degrees or so doesn’t mean you’d want to. That’s an indicator that you’ve almost doubled your metabolic rate, and that’s getting in the danger zone. It’s not so much that the heat is going to do you in; it’s just that the low amount of ATP in the cell could really hurt you.
TS: Could you take some type of coenzyme like pyruvate to boost the ATP levels in the liver?
DD: Yes, you could do that; however, there’s a decrease of thyroid in the body after the first 48 hours of using DNP. Part of it has to do with ATP depletion in the liver, but the DNP also allows most of the thyroid to be unbound—the T4—so it’s excreted faster out of the body. So even though your TSH and your thyroid output are normal, you’re not getting as much thyroid available in the body because it’s shunted out. That’s why after 48 hours you’ll see a slight decrease in body temperature that you should restore by using Cytomel.
TS: What’s a safe dosage of DNP?
DD: Because you can double your metabolic rate, most people lose the weight so fast, they end up eating these amazing amounts of calories to keep up with the burning off; that’s when you’re using about seven or eight milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight. I think if you keep it to three or four milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight, you’ll be much more comfortable. You might be warm but not unusually so, and you won’t be sweating heavily. And eventually you’ll lose as much bodyfat as you want, even with no calorie restriction.
TS: Wow! No calorie restriction? Sounds good to me. But is this stuff dangerous in the long term as far as cancer—with DNP being a phenol and all?
DD: No. Well, that’s odd because someone mentioned in one of the discussion groups that all phenols in general are carcinogenic and mutogenic, but I’m not quite sure if that’s true because none of the research shows any kind of tumor acceleration or cancer growth. Even the cataract problem that surfaced all of a sudden in the mid-1930s—exclusively in women, for some odd reason—was due to a depletion of vitamin C and glutathione in the eyeball. Just two weeks ago on the news they were talking about cataracts and old age and how individuals should be using more vitamin C. So perhaps the whole cataract issue…can be avoided by taking more antioxidants.
TS: You’ve said that you tried DNP about a year ago. Have you noticed any side effects now that you’ve had time to reflect?
DD: No, just that I probably dropped the weight too fast. There are a few things I learned about DNP afterward, through the research. It mentions that some individuals, when they’re on DNP for weeks at a time, stop losing bodyweight. The scale didn’t seem to budge, even though the scientists were measuring an elevated metabolic rate from oxygen burning. And they figured out that the body, in some strange way, was holding water. Once the subjects stopped taking DNP, most of it was flushed out with more urination. So you might be doing DNP and not show any weight loss, but when you come off it, suddenly you lose five pounds over three or four days from water [excretion].
TS: You’ve also written about a natural substance that may be as effective as DNP for fat loss. Can you give us more information on that?
DD: I have two sources, one of which I had to dig for at the UCLA [University of California at Los Angeles] medical library. It was very early [research]. One was purified extract of blowfly thoraxes [laughs]. The other might be an herbal substance that has some kind of fermentation, but I’ll have a better answer in another week or so when I find out what the compound is. I have the name of it, and I’ve done an Internet search, but I can’t find out what it is.
TS: So you think this might be a safe alternative to DNP?
DD: Um, I don’t think it’s necessarily safe, but it’s legal for interstate shipment.
TS: IGF-1. Are any of the top bodybuilders using it, and if so, how much? I heard [one pro] was I.V.ing the stuff.
DD: Well, I.V. would be the way to do it, just like growth hormone. But I’m not sure. It used to be a little easier to get a few years ago because Gro-Pep had an outlet in Utah. Now you have to get it from Australia direct. I don’t know. I assume some of [the pros] are still using it. I would estimate the dosage to be no more than 50 micrograms every time. That’s an odd circumstance because the human trials were done in milligrams per day, so it’s hard to believe that micrograms would have an effect, but who knows?
TS: Synthol [the compound you can inject directly into the muscle to make it swell] seems to be all the rage among top pro and amateur bodybuilders.
DD: Yeah, that’s odd because I haven’t seen the Olympia pictures yet, but I’m wondering which bodybuilder at the Olympia had remarkably bigger bodyparts this year as opposed to last.
TS: Do you think it’s safe in the long term?
DD: No, I don’t. But I can’t tell why it’s going to be unsafe. My gut feeling is that something bad is going to happen. I have a feeling the reason the oil doesn’t dissipate is somehow…. It’s hard to believe that an oil would stay in an area for months at a time unless there is some kind of collagen encapsulation going on, where the body is protecting itself from the substance. It would be just like a breast implant—smooth ones that don’t have the ripples and [contain] collagen.
TS: I remember you once said that injecting small amounts of silicone into the muscles would give a similar effect.
DD: I would sooner do that than I’d do Synthol.
TS: Didn’t bodybuilders in the ’70s do something like that?
DD: I broached this subject with two plastic surgeons, and Bruce Nadler [a plastic surgeon in the New York area] told me step by step how one could do this safely. And then my plastic surgeon in Los Angeles, who is into historical procedures, looked around in the literature and even asked a few old-time plastic surgeons, and they haven’t said anything about it. But it seems to me that it did happen.
TS: Hmm, so this might be better than injecting Synthol?
DD: Well, you know, although they have problems with direct injections of silicone, they’ve used silicone for decades to fluff up pock marks on surface skin, and that’s the same procedure. As long as it’s small, it’s going to encapsulate, and I don’t think it’s going to move.
TS: Let’s move on to something else. You’ve written about a new veterinary vaccine that may be beneficial to bodybuilders. Can you elaborate?
DD: Nope, I just got a little blurb on it off something, and I never really pursued it. I should, though, because all [the researchers] could say is what it did well, but since it’s for animals they didn’t say what it did that was bad for you. It must somehow affect insulin—either secretion or sensitivity.
TS: So what does it do exactly?
DD: Well, there’s anti-hormones that can slow down the pulse rate of growth hormone coming out of the pituitary, and I think that’s how it works. I don’t think it blocks so much the action of growth hormone; it just doesn’t allow the growth hormone to pulse out as well as it should.
TS: Speaking of growth hormone, Muscle Media has hinted that they have a growth-hormone-releasing compound that can be sold as a dietary supplement. Do you know anything about that?
DD: I think that’s foo-foo bunk. They don’t have it. If they did, they’d release it, and even if they did, it hasn’t been researched. EAS [which is owned by Bill Phillips, who also publishes Muscle Media] would never sell something like that. They’re too mainstream.
TS: Do you have any idea what they’re talking about?
DD: Obviously it must be some kind of protein that’s cleaved down into a peptide short enough to mimic that chain of releasing hormone.
TS: What about So Cal’s liquid creatine, Turbo Blast 600? Evidently, they’re saying this stuff is 600 percent more effective than regular powdered creatine. Is that true, and could it be something beneficial for most bodybuilders?
DD: The concept is good. The So Cal stuff is probably creatine with propylene glycol, and, yeah, it’s okay, but it’s expensive. You could just use six times the amount of powdered creatine from another source and get the same effect. But if you have a problem with gastric upset or diarrhea or just don’t want to do lukewarm creatine, maybe this is an alternative.
TS: Do you think their claims match up to their products?
DD: You have to realize that the only way you sell supplements in this industry as a newcomer is with hype. Basically, everybody has the same products, and you can either be an established company, like Twinlab, and the prestige somehow gets the product sold, or you can sell a product with hype. But if it doesn’t work, people aren’t going to keep buying it. MuscleTech went from nowhere to a major company just from hype and hammering away with advertising. [James] Bradshaw and [John] Cribbs [of So Cal] realize hype works, and they will do as much as they can without breaking laws.
TS: Without a doubt androstenedione is the hottest supplement on the market right now, and I’m sure the readers would like to know a little more about it, what it can do and the optimal dosage. I’ve been using 400 milligrams a half hour before my workout, and I’ve been getting pretty good results. Is that a proper dosage?
DD: It depends on what your liver can do with it. Women do a much better job of converting androstenedione to testosterone.
TS: Why? Higher estrogen levels?
DD: Well, you’re close. They have progesterone, and men don’t. You have to realize that progesterone both lowers estrogen and increases 17-beta hydroxy dehydrogenase, the major steroid enzyme that converts androstenedione to testosterone. Men don’t have much because they don’t have any progesterone. You can get around that by using some progesterone cream, and that would improve the conversion rate. You could probably take about 100 milligrams of pregnenolone along with your androstenedione, and that would be rapidly converted to progesterone.
TS: What about the other androstenedione derivatives, such as—
DD: Androdiol or the nor version?
TS: Both.
DD: Not too many companies have the nor version; I think its kind of expensive. It’s around $1,500 a kilo. It shouldn’t be much better, but the people who are using it are raving about it, so we’ll see.
The androdiol is quite potent. It’s a different enzyme conversion—it’s 3-beta rather than 17-beta. It’s a good androgen, so it’s converted right in the blood. It’s about three times testosterone more per milligram [than androstenedione], converted. I’m not sure if it’s exactly legal, but it can’t be that illegal because it’s in the same category as DHEA, I guess.
TS: Is this stuff dangerous?
DD: Quite androgenic. Even before it’s converted, it’s very androgenic, and some studies pointed out that it’s even more androgenic than testosterone.
TS: Couldn’t you take an anti-aromatase, like chrysin?
DD: Yeah, Osmo has a few hundred kilos coming in at a very attractive price. The thing is, since no one has really used it in humans, we’re just estimating that you need two grams. Of course, there is always the cheap idiot who only uses a little and then says, “Oh, this stuff doesn’t work.”
TS: Mwahaha. Yeah, I know what you mean. Let’s move on to steroids. What would be the ideal steroid dosage for, say, a bodybuilder who has never used them before? The general consensus is that a bodybuilder’s first cycle is the most effective.
DD: I don’t know. I haven’t used steroids for so long, it’s hard to say. In the old days we used much higher dosages—10 Dianabol a day and 400 to 600 milligrams of Deca-Durabolin every week. People think that’s a high dosage, but that was a starting dose 10 years ago.
TS: So there really is no answer.
DD: There are two answers. One is that you can only get so much anabolic effect from…. If they stick around for weeks at a time or 12 hours at a time, like orals, studies state that’s not the way your body pulsates steroids. So you have so much anabolic activity through the receptor, but some steroids, above a certain dosage, cause additional anabolic effects outside the receptor. The problem is, the type of steroids and the dosages with which this happens are extreme. The novice steroid user maybe wouldn’t want to ethically, morally or personally consider—or even financially—doing four grams a week, the dosage at which a lot of people say the magic begins to happen. You have Milos [Sarcev] going from 210 to 250, you know?
TS: I heard that was mostly insulin.
DD: You can tell that. Just shake hands. If they’re big and squishy and watery, then [the person is] on insulin and growth hormone.
TS: Let’s talk about pro bodybuilding for a second. If you look at pictures of bodybuilding contests from the late ’80s and compare them to the physiques of today, there’s a remarkable difference. Is the change mostly chemical?
DD: Yep. It also might be…. Whenever you get fat in the off-season and then diet it off, the muscle comes off too. These people are much leaner off-season than they ever used to be.
TS: So mostly that would be clenbuterol, insulin and growth hormone.
DD: Yes, plus back then they relied on a lot of really weak anabolics [because] they thought the precision and the exotic nature of them made them better, but because the availability isn’t there anymore, they’re falling back on the more androgenic steroids that happen to be more anabolic at the same time.
TS: Is it safe for a recreational bodybuilder to inject insulin—in the long and short term?
DD: Depends on how much. If they’re only talking about the old one I.U. per 15 pounds of bodyweight maybe once a day, then that’s okay. You’re not going to wreck your pancreas by injecting insulin, but you will wreck your insulin sensitivity. Hopefully, that will go back to normal. Maybe in a young person that would happen. I’m a little concerned with high-level insulin use in middle-aged people. One of the big parts of aging is a lowered insulin sensitivity. Most old people are borderline type-2 diabetics.
TS: Couldn’t you take Glucophage or Phenformin to help increase insulin sensitivity?
DD: You could probably do that, although Metformin hasn’t had much success. There are other things coming. The new research [points to] beta-3 agonists as being ideal because you get both insulin secretion and insulin-receptor uptake.
TS: Isn’t that herbal stuff Synephrine a beta-3 agonist?
DD: Even ephedrine has some beta-3 action. I don’t know about the other one you mentioned. There’s not much brown fat on most non-northern latitude adults, so I don’t think it’s much of an issue.
TS: So if a bodybuilder was using insulin once a day, how long should he or she stay on it?
DD: When you first start using insulin, if you don’t eat anything after the first hour and a half, you start getting shaky, but after a while at the same dosage you won’t. That means your blood sugar is maintaining itself, which means your cells aren’t accepting the insulin.
I have a friend who’s doing a very interesting experiment. He’s using moderate amounts of insulin and eating no carbs at all during the day. He eats so much protein that whatever glucose he needs, his body converts it from amino acids.
TS: So insulin isn’t all that dangerous if you use small amounts for short periods?
DD: Oh, you should be all right—unless you’re one of the unlucky people who get fat under their stomach from it.