191–200 of 308 posts
Assuming there are a significant number of men on here who hope to some day have a family, it's inportant to note that a significant side effect of exogenous testosterone administration is male infertility. Simplified, the excess testosterone in the blood stream sends signals that shut down the hormones essential for sperm production. This may not matter if you are mid life or older and already have children, or if y…
This is quack science. I wouldn't exchange temporary muscular gains for getting bald and other nasty long term side effects.
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Zinc, magnesium and vitamin D are essential for the production of testosterone.
The fact that they're necessary conditions for its production doesn't mean they're sufficient, though. It doesn't follow that you can just take a vitamin pill and get some sunlight and you'll naturally have high levels of testosterone.
The evidence is strongly suggestive that vitamin D supplementation has an effect on testosterone levels in men.
On a purely anecdotal, personal level, I had my free test checked some years back, before I started vitamin D supplementation. After supplementing with 10,000 IUs a day for around a year, I had it checked again and it was significantly higher (I don't have the numbers now, sorry).
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This is a good point. Men do more dangerous jobs, are much more likely to be murdered, do riskier behavior, and commit suicide more often. On the other hand, women bear children, which historically would have been a huge cause of early death. Not as much these days, though.
That makes me wonder though, is the statistic that women live longer than men a first world, modern thing, or is it a historical trend? I'd think as little as a hundred years ago it might not have been as true, or am I off base?
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I wonder if this could be attributed to STDs, jealous lovers, and other risks a sexual active person might be exposed to compared to a sexually inactive person.
Or it could simply be reduced stress. After my second orchiectomy related to cancer, I had to wait several weeks before I could see an endocrinologist about testosterone replacement, so in that time my bioavailable testosterone basically declined to nearly nothing. At one point I became so mellow that stuff that would normally bother me just got ignored. In some ways, it was a kind of a bliss-- I even considered not…
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I don't think so. If testosterone is the culprit for increased risk of coronary artery disease, prostate cancer and sleep apnea, then doing things that naturally increase testosterone will increase risk also. Don't succumb to the naturalistic fallacy. The body doesn't care where it gets its chemicals from.
> Don't succumb to the naturalistic fallacy. The body doesn't care where it gets its chemicals from. Even if that's true, our bodies are also great at offloading tasks. If you train your body to think that Testosterone (or anything else, for that matter) will come from external sources, it will stop producing it naturally, and will become worse at regulating it's own T levels.
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Or it could simply be reduced stress. After my second orchiectomy related to cancer, I had to wait several weeks before I could see an endocrinologist about testosterone replacement, so in that time my bioavailable testosterone basically declined to nearly nothing. At one point I became so mellow that stuff that would normally bother me just got ignored. In some ways, it was a kind of a bliss-- I even considered not…
Very interesting, thanks. I'm curious though, did your doc bring your levels up to normal range or lower, and did you ever discuss this (keeping the levels lower than normal)?
Because of this, my doctor and I both agreed not have my dosage increased. From my perspective, I just didn't want to use more meds than I need to.
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Your source does not support your claim that research has not shown that meditation beats a placebo. Apart from pointing out that "meditation" is a wide ranging concept that includes a vast number of different, often contradictory, practices, and that a lot of the research is of poor quality (given the number of "research" papers coming out of TM affiliated sources alone - see blow -, that should not be a surprise),…
It might be possible to do a double-blind study on meditation, but you would have to be incredibly strict about the procedure for achieving a meditative state, and you would have to select people who know nothing about "meditation" as a practice both to administer bouts of meditation and to participate in the study. Then your part in the study would be to teach the controls the "placebo" practice and to teach the non…
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Your source does not support your claim that research has not shown that meditation beats a placebo. Apart from pointing out that "meditation" is a wide ranging concept that includes a vast number of different, often contradictory, practices, and that a lot of the research is of poor quality (given the number of "research" papers coming out of TM affiliated sources alone - see blow -, that should not be a surprise),…
It might be possible to do a double-blind study on meditation, but you would have to be incredibly strict about the procedure for achieving a meditative state, and you would have to select people who know nothing about "meditation" as a practice both to administer bouts of meditation and to participate in the study. Then your part in the study would be to teach the controls the "placebo" practice and to teach the non…
It's often taught as "just sitting" so by the time you get the control group to sit down, shut up and hold still for half an hour every day they're doing the practice. Heck, they may be doing it better than the Zen meditators because they won't have anything extra attached to it at all :)
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I don't think so. If testosterone is the culprit for increased risk of coronary artery disease, prostate cancer and sleep apnea, then doing things that naturally increase testosterone will increase risk also. Don't succumb to the naturalistic fallacy. The body doesn't care where it gets its chemicals from.
Don't succumb to the reductionist fallacy. The body is complex, and more than the sum of its parts, including its hormones. It's entirely possible that the process that produces testosterone naturally also has other effects that mitigate the downside of testosterone.