Most people, especially athletes, know that using steroids is a bad idea. Of course, except when your doctor says so. Steroids may help you increase your muscle mass, but they also come with many health risks.
However, what if a drug has the effects of steroids but without its risks? Yes, we’re talking about a category of drugs called Selective Androgen Receptor Modulator or SARMs. So, what are SARMs, and how do they work?
Despite popular belief, SARMs are not anabolic steroids. They were discovered back in the 1990s. Like steroids, they increase muscle mass and enhance your performance since they stimulate anabolism and improve the recovery from intense usage of muscles, which is essential for athletes.
However, there’s still a considerable debate among scientists and doctors about the morality and legality of the usage of SARMs. Currently, SARMs are legal to sell or buy as long as it’s marketed and bought only for research purposes. That means marketing and buying it for recreational use as a dietary supplement is illegal.
So, What are SARMs?
Over the last three decades, scientists have debated whether the scientific community should consider using SARMs to treat diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, wasting syndrome, and osteoporosis, which have symptoms of unwanted weight loss. As mentioned earlier, SARMs, just like steroids, bind to androgen receptors.
However, while steroids bind to androgen receptors all over the body, different types of SARMs only bind to specific tissues like some of the muscles and liver. This leads researchers to consider using SARMs to only target specific parts of the body to increase a person’s endurance and recover after intense muscle usage. This means that SARMs are being considered to be used for enhancement while avoiding health risks.
Where Did SARM Come From?
SARMs were created by accident in the 1990s when a scientist named Professor James T. Dalton was researching treatments to cure prostate cancer. He identified the molecule andarine, which is the first-ever SARM ever discovered. It has very little use for treating prostate cancer, but it has effects that significantly improve muscle growth.
In an interview with Men’s Health, he once said, “It was the opposite of what we were looking for at the time. But we turned almost all of our attention to this. We knew we had something unique.” Years later, Dalton created a more refined version, which he called ostarine.
During clinical trials, elderly men were exposed to a 12–week course of taking ostarine. The drug gave them more muscle mass and reduced fat, and gave them 15% more climbing power.
But when used on cancer patients, the drug failed to obtain the same results, which halted the development of the drug. However, several companies had been doing a black market of discoveries about the drug, and Dalton tried to curb this, along with the FDA. But this black market of sorts has already been rampant, and there’s little they can do to stop it.
Is SARM Safe to Use?
Though SARMs have shown promise by functioning like an anabolic steroid without the repercussions, the FDA hasn’t approved them yet. However, some retailers sell them on the black market. The drug isn’t approved because its safety profile is still unknown, which means they are still testing it if it poses no risks of usage to the human body.
Also, even though they are not entirely legal yet, there are brands of dietary supplements that incorporate SARMs in their products, which the FDA has already taken. Several of these companies are Infantry Labs, Panther Sports Nutrition, AndroPharm, etc.
Also, back in October, the FDA released a statement regarding the potential dangers of SARMs. They also said that body-building supplements that incorporate SARMs have not yet been approved by the FDA, further advising people to check the ingredients of their body-building supplements.
Rumoured Side Effects
We would like to preface this with a statement that these side effects are anecdotal and have no scientific confirmation. On online forums, people who took SARMs have been saying that they are dealing with several issues like skin rashes, high blood pressure, and impotence. However, many people have attributed some side effects, especially skin rashes, to be an allergic reaction to the other ingredients of the supplements.
Other problems like vision issues have also surfaced, like having a vision tinted with green or yellow. Also, most of the information about taking SARMs is primarily from YouTubers, which might be biased since they don’t want to lose sponsorship.
Something to Remember
Although SARMs have shown promise, they are still not approved by the FDA. There are even laws made for these specific reasons, which you can see in BuzzRx’s overview. They need more testing. We don’t know much about them yet, and even though initial testing shows that they don’t have side effects, they are not applied to many factors yet. So, for now, stay away from them. Not only are you risking yourself of their side effects, but you might also face some legal repercussions.
