CBS Report: Alabama players took deer antler spray, other banned substances before 2012 BCS Championship
January 29th, 2013 at 5:54 PM ^
What the hell is deer antler spray?
January 29th, 2013 at 5:56 PM ^
January 29th, 2013 at 6:10 PM ^
January 29th, 2013 at 6:13 PM ^
Full disclosure: this is not my work. I did a Google search.
January 29th, 2013 at 6:27 PM ^
Weird that that picture already existed.
January 29th, 2013 at 6:40 PM ^
January 29th, 2013 at 6:51 PM ^
Oh, OK. Not so weird then, you're right.
January 29th, 2013 at 6:46 PM ^
No it's not. It's the internet. What's weird is that deer antler spray hasn't been Rule 34'd yet.
January 29th, 2013 at 7:14 PM ^
You must have done a very thorough and exhaustive search. I would highly recommend cleaning your browser history.
January 29th, 2013 at 9:50 PM ^
What about deer antler roll-on?? Can I still use that?
January 30th, 2013 at 12:48 PM ^
must... resist... urge... to google search deer antler spray porn
January 29th, 2013 at 7:20 PM ^
I think I just pissed myself
Can't stop laughing.
January 29th, 2013 at 7:43 PM ^
10...9...8....7...6...5....
January 29th, 2013 at 8:06 PM ^
Ask and ye shall receive!!
January 29th, 2013 at 10:27 PM ^
January 30th, 2013 at 9:44 AM ^
Extract of Deer antler, has natural growth hormone in it. yummy.
January 29th, 2013 at 5:56 PM ^
Is that what they do in the south?
January 30th, 2013 at 3:43 AM ^
January 29th, 2013 at 5:58 PM ^
I just don't care anymore.
January 29th, 2013 at 6:01 PM ^
I mean, when you're already winning tainted championships, you might as well do everything you can to make sure you actually win them.
January 29th, 2013 at 6:02 PM ^
and it does not work. Why this is banned is beyond me.
January 29th, 2013 at 6:03 PM ^
What is it supposed to do?
January 29th, 2013 at 6:10 PM ^
It's got a variant of HGH in it
January 29th, 2013 at 6:13 PM ^
It's got electrolytes
It's what plants crave
January 29th, 2013 at 7:54 PM ^
I've never seen no plants grow out of no toilet.
January 29th, 2013 at 6:49 PM ^
January 29th, 2013 at 6:03 PM ^
Form of Growth Hormone, From http://www.deerantlerspray.org/
What is Deer Antler Spray?
Red Deer Antler Velvet is something that Asian medicine has known about for a very long time, well over 2000 years, but only lately has the Western world caught on to. Taken from mature male Red Deer, this substance is processed and used in both traditional Chinese medicine and in Western culture as a nutritional supplement. In the west it is called “deer antler spray” or deer antler velvet. No matter what the name, it is harvested from populations of Red Deer in New Zealand. These farmed deer are known to be disease free and thus provide the best quality antler velvet.
Although it has been known to work for centuries, although only in the last thirty years has science uncovered why. The active ingredient in this product is a very effective growth hormone that has great impact on the human body. While it can be taken in a powdered form, via pill or in a drink, the most popular form is in a spray. This spray is known as red deer antler spray and has a fat based delivery system that claims to deliver the hormone into the bloodstream faster and have more of the hormone where it will do the most good for longer then a pill or powder can.
This is a product made from Red Deer farmed in New Zealand. Male Red Deer produce antlers each year, and these antlers are removed from the animal while they are still “velvet” covered to keep the males from injuring each other. This material can be taken from the deer just like a fingernail can be removed by certificated farmers and Veterinarians, leaving the animal unharmed. Because antlers grow at an astounding speed, the entire harvest takes just a few weeks. After removal the velvet deer antler is freeze dried and processed into various forms from powders and pills to sprays.
Deer antler spray has been linked to a number of hormones that are proven to have positive health benefits. The most important is IGF-1. IGF-1, or Insulin-like Growth Factor-1, is the star hormone here. This performance enhancing chemical is naturally made by the body, and thus is hard to detect in standard dope-testing. It is a byproduct of HGH in the body. And where HGH is heavily controlled, getting IGF-1 into the blood through the use of these sprays is legal. It has been proven that IGF-1 helps with muscle development and performance. It does this by transporting energy and building blocks that muscles need. More being delivered to the muscle cells mean they can work faster at healing or growing.
The side effect of this is that by using deer antler spray one can improve athletic performance, simulate the metabolism, improve the overall condition of the heart, and help fight off colds and flu. By allowing the body to burn off more stored sugars and require the burning of fat stores to fuel increased muscle use, this spray can do a lot in way of rejuvenation on the body. This may help with nerve damage repair as well. Deer Antler spray has IGF II, NGF, TGF-B, EGF, FGF, and a score of other growth factors, in addition to a wide range of proteins as well.
This is a very popular nutritional supplement. It is also nearly impossible to detect if it is being used. This is one reason why such sport figures like Bengals safety Roy Williams feel as though they can come right out and admit using deer antler spray on a regular basis. Mr. Williams has never come up positive on a doping test, so even though IGF-1 is a banned substance in the NFL, there is no way that a urine- based test can detect it. Coaches (like Hue Jackson), athletes (yep even the legendary Ray Lewis), who knows who else, all use this spray, and for all we know, really, there’s little harm in it.
Fact is, deer antler spray is based in medicine used in Asia for centuries. The spray is natural, discrete, effective, and for the most part clean to use. Since it is something that naturally occurs in the body it cannot be detected by standard tests. There appears to be limited long term risks involved in using it, although there are some well documented benefits to it. While it might not be for everyone, deer antler spray does have positive points for those who do need it, and increasingly many people will find they do need it.
January 29th, 2013 at 6:11 PM ^
January 29th, 2013 at 6:25 PM ^
January 29th, 2013 at 6:50 PM ^
Sublingually is the preferred administration..
January 29th, 2013 at 6:38 PM ^
I made the mistake of clicking on that link. Is that in English? I feel small and dumb. I have both an engineering (from UM) and a law degree, and I felt insignificant and unworthy to read that medical-science stuff. Wow.
Can someone translate it? What's it mean?
January 29th, 2013 at 6:43 PM ^
January 29th, 2013 at 6:50 PM ^
If it makes you feel any better, (we) medical folk who are fluent in that type of writing usually can't make heads or tails of engineering schematics or legal documents.
That paper's abstract boils down to "Muscles have a natural, pre-programmed way to regenerate. This can be exploited and used to make muscles grow extra big if the muscles are exposed to IGF-1. Blah blah blah we're really important because we proved this, here's our paper, now give us some sort of award."
January 29th, 2013 at 7:14 PM ^
would eventually allow me to shine on an internet message board someday. That day has arrived.
It's just an abstract and not a full paper, so there's not much to it other than to say that the lab added the gene for IGF protein to skeletal muscle cells and then measured those cells for growth activity using a standard method (it's indirect-- they look for activity at a "transcription factor" called GATA-2 which ordinarily won't get turned from DNA into RNA, so when they see lots of it, they know the muscle cell is turned on).
So "localized IGF transgene expression sustains hypertrophy and regeneration in senescent skeletal muscle" is just a way of saying "we made IGF just in this one type of non-growing muscle cell and voila, it started getting pumped up like Popeye eating spinach."
Given that they noted using "transgenic embryos," it's a good bet this was done in mice. Yes, you probably guessed what that means. Mice are now strong enough to take over the world.
I for one welcome our new murine overlords.
January 29th, 2013 at 7:24 PM ^
January 29th, 2013 at 7:36 PM ^
that IGF-1 or HGH or other substances will increase lean muscle. Your point about bioavailability is spot on. The amount of the hormone and it's method of administration (and absorption) is what matters.
January 29th, 2013 at 11:00 PM ^
Ok so will the spray work??
Serious question because i was planning on starting to weight train again. I'd buy some of this if I knew it was real but this just sounds like a 2010's version of snake oil.
January 30th, 2013 at 6:15 AM ^
January 30th, 2013 at 7:45 AM ^
January 29th, 2013 at 7:42 PM ^
Most likely, simple exogenous (i.e., free-form protein just kinda dumped on the cells) addition of IGF-1 would give you some measurable effect on a simple in vitro cell-culture assay, assuming the muscle cells have a surface receptor for the stuff.
But in the mouse model they're using in the paper, you can't really pump IGF into the mouse for that long, and even if you did, you could get effects all over the organism depending on bioavailability, not just the muscle. What they did was much cleaner and fancy: put the gene for the expression into the embryo under the control of a muscle cell promoter, so it only turns on in muscle cells and you can isolate the effect. That's more of a gold-standard approach; the quick-and-dirty proof-of-concept would be what you describe, just feeding the stuff to the cells.
January 29th, 2013 at 7:52 PM ^
Was going to respond but I couldn't have explained it better.
I did a lot of research in on skeletal muscle during undergrad. If your'e curious, Ron Allen at Arizona has done quite a bit of work on the effects of growth factors on skeletal muscle growth and development. Here are two more relevant abstracts:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2918032
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2180733
January 29th, 2013 at 6:30 PM ^
Apparently one side effect is an inability to edit your own writing.
January 29th, 2013 at 7:13 PM ^
I don't even know where to begin. Despite the lousy writing that might suggest otherwise, I can assure you a scientist did not write this.
What the fudge does "certificated farmer' mean, anyway?
ARRRRRRRGGGGHHHBULLSHITPSEUDOSCIENCEARRRRRRRGGGHHH
January 29th, 2013 at 7:17 PM ^
Right, they just let anyone publish in Nature Genetics I think.
Different types of science have different communication standards. In a journal like Nature Genetics, an author isn't writing to their mom, they are writing to another top expert in their own field. What pray tell makes you think a scientist didn't write this?
Edit, nevermind, you replied to the weird website copy/paste post. Carry on.
January 29th, 2013 at 7:29 PM ^
You think "deerantlerspray.org" is run by the journal Nature Genetics?
The Nature group of journals are some of the highest impact-factor journals in the world. See that abstract cited a few posts down? (or up, depending on your settings) Read that abstract. That's written by a qualified scientist in a Nature journal.
How about the most painfully obvious stupidity in the whole thing-- that deer antler spray "can't be detected" because it is naturally occuring in the body. In whose body? Deer? If you have a non-human protein floating around in a human, it's not that hard to detect it, assuming the excretory or immune system hasn't cleared it already as a protein from a foreign animal that is not known for homogeneity to humans and wouldn't have a cognate cellular receptor in a human, much less one localized to myocytes (muscle cells).
Oh, my head.