Canned peas, beans, chickpeas and steroids
Today, we have some hot, hot hormone
Talk, but first, something i swear is totally unrelated: what's up with the bean juice? ask adam.
My question is about the liquid preservatives in canned food. Think canned peas, beans, chickpeas, pineapples, whatever. Anything that comes canned, usually floating in some sort of liquid. When I was growing up, I was always taught to actually drain out the water of my canned chickpeas for example and rinse it a little bit before putting it in whatever food I'm cooking, presumably because the liquid is full of preservatives, and for some reason that's bad.
In my mind, this doesn't make total sense, because whatever preservatives are in the liquid presumably over the shelf life of the can are also in the chickpeas or beans that I'm eating. Adam: Ah, yes. The bean juice. What is it, and must it really be discarded? Short answer is no. The liquid inside all canned goods is just as edible as the solids in the can. However, there are some legitimate reasons to avoid eating the bean juice or whatever the canning liquid is, and we will discuss all such legitimate reasons that I can think of. Why are all canned goods submerged in some kind of weird goo? Well, come back with me to the Napoleonic Wars. "An army marches on its stomach," Napoleon almost certainly did not actually say; there is no record of him saying that, but he certainly knew it was true.
He knew what all military commanders have known since the dawn of large scale expeditionary warfare in the parts of the world that have winter, and that is war pretty much has to take a break for winter, because there's no food in winter. Armies have historically packed some of their own provisions, sure, but until pretty recently armies on campaign have mostly lived off of the land, AKA stolen food from the local peasants and left them there to starve. Because what are they going to do about it? We have 10,000 hungry guys with spears, what have they got? But even pillaging is not an assured method of getting fed when you're marching far from home in the dead of winter, when there are no crops to raid; nor does pillaging work so well in the desert, as you know well Achmed.
Napoleon found this out the hard way in Egypt in 1798 when he marched 50,000 men from Alexandria to Cairo, in 1798. 50,000 European men wearing European uniforms made for European weather. They got real hot. They thought that they would be able to live off of the land, as they had just done during their Italian campaign. So when they got really tired and hot in Egypt, they just started discarding items from their pack in order to shed weight, including their canteens and their hard biscuits.
They quickly found out what a bad idea that was. Bonaparte, Bony, he made the exact same mistake the next year when he marched his army to Syria. In both marches, there are horrifying stories of men committing suicide en masse, driven mad by hunger and thirst and despair. Bony didn't really care though. One of his secrets to success was that he was willing to march his men when and where enemy commanders would not march their men, because they knew that they would lose thousands of men to hunger, and disease, and exposure. Bony came up with a brilliant solution to that problem. It was a genius strategy. It was called not caring.
Then again, starvation does exhibit a significant negative correlation with a soldier's fighting capacity, and a few years before those disastrous campaigns, the French army had actually put out a bounty. They said anybody who can come up with a cheaper, better way of preserving food so that we can march when and where we please, anybody who can invent that shall get 12,000 Francs. I couldn't really figure out a way to adjust that number for inflation, but I think it would've been a lot.
And some years later in 1810, the
Prize was won by nicolas appert, one of a few people who get called the father of food science.
He had a factory outside of Paris where he made bottled food. He would fill up a glass bottle with raw, wet food, the ingredients to a soup or a stew, et cetera. He would seal all of those ingredients into the bottle with a cork and with some wax, and then what he would do is he would cook the food inside the bottle by holding the bottle inside boiling water. Appert had absolutely no idea why his invention worked.
He died in ignorance. This is before they even really had the Germ Theory of disease, and they certainly didn't know that microorganisms were responsible for food spoilage. Louis Pasteur figured that out half a century later, and even he didn't quite get it right. Appert's process worked because the cooking in the bottle killed the microorganisms, sure; but it also created an anaerobic environment. The heat caused the contents of the bottle to expand, forcing out most of the air. And then when the bottle cooled back down again, the contents contracted, and the headspace between the food and the sealed cork was left with nothing. A vacuum. Most spoilage and pathogenic microorganisms need air, with the very notable exception of the bacteria that cause botulism, and that's why botulism was a constant hazard with canned food until modern manufacturing and packing almost entirely fixed that problem.
But forget about botulism for a sec. Most spoilage and pathogenic microorganisms need air, and by pushing the air out of the bottle through the cooking process, Nicolas Appert managed to preserve food without making it super acidic or super salty. Sure, an army can march with salted meat, but in order to actually eat it, they would have to boil it with a ton of fresh ingredients to distribute the salt across all of them, or soak it several times in several changes of water to purge all the salt before actually eating it. If you just tried to live off of eating salt pork straight out of the barrel, no soaking, no purging, you would eventually die of salt poisoning. Even essentially nutrients are deadly poisons in sufficient quantity. With this new bottled food, there was no preparation necessary. You wouldn't have to stop and soak your food to get all the salt out. The soldier simply cracked the bottle, goes to town, and most importantly keeps on marching.
Sure, an army can march on dried biscuits, but those you also generally need to soak before eating, especially in the days before modern dentistry; and you'd eventually get scurvy, because ain't no vitamin C in grains or in meat. You've got to eat at least some fruits and vegetables, and canning made that much easier to do in extreme conditions. Nicolas Appert's invention was a big breakthrough, though it had precedence. There is historical disagreement about whether normal home cooks in France already knew about boiling in bottles, and that Appert simply stole their idea. Certainly home cooks knew about potting. That's an ancient practice, where you take some wet food like some stewed meat, you put it into a little clay pot, you pack it tight, you smooth out the surface, and then you pour on hot rendered fat; animal fat, because it's highly saturated and it's therefore solid at room temperature, at least in the cooler climates of the world.
The fat solidifies and forms a solid seal. Underneath the seal, there is the food and no air, because the food was wet.
Water or other liquid filled up all the little gaps between the food. For conventional canning or other similar processes, the food needs to be submerged in liquid so that the liquid displaces the air. When the food is wet, there's only a tiny little bit of air that you need to squeeze out from the headspace of the bottle or from the can. People very quickly figured out that tin cans are way better for this than glass, much lighter, which is why we call this canning and not bottling, even though we still do it with bottles. When we do it with bottles we call it canning.
Now we've got all kinds of vacuum
Packing technology, but back then they did not.
Old school heat treating is only good
For squeezing out a little bit of air, plus if most of the empty space inside your can is filled up with water, then there's less of a pressure differential between the inside of the can and the outside of the can.
Assuming you did manage to evacuate all the air from a container of dry food, well then you'd have the pressure of all the atmosphere crushing down on this mostly empty container, and the container would be liable to break.
And even the tiniest little break would break the seal and the food would spoil. These days, they are able to can foods under vacuum without submerging them in liquid. This is mostly done, from what I can see, with corn, fresh sweet corn cut off the cob and then canned inside a vacuum chamber. Modern cans are strong enough to hold this vacuum, and they have a plastic liner inside them that makes it less likely for the seal to break prematurely. Look for some vacuum canned corn at the grocery store. When you crack it open with a can opener, you hear the seal break, this little hiss. And inside are loose, fresh corn kernels, wet with their own natural moisture, but they are not submerged in liquid, there's nothing to drain off. And they taste pretty good.
I imagine this, or one reason why this works so well for corn kernels is that they are small and regularly shaped, and that means you can pack a can pretty tightly with corn so that there isn't much air to get out. And that again minimizes the pressure differential between the outside and the inside of the can. But most canned goods are still canned in the old way, submerged in liquid, because that's what consumers know and expect, and I imagine it's cheaper than modern vacuum canning. The liquid inside the can is usually water based, though sometimes it's oil based, fat. Think of all the great canned seafood products packed in oil. There are these Spanish sardines canned in olive oil with a little bit of lemon. They are a phenomenal high protein snack, the lemon really freshens it up. And you would not want to drain off all of that oil, because tons of fat soluble nutrients are going to be in that oil.
Vitamins A, D, E, and K are all fat soluble, so they just migrate out of the fish and into the oil inside the can. Plus, that oil tastes real good. I used to be that guy who opened a can of sardines in the break room at work. In my defense I only ever did that when no one else was in there, but I'm sure the smell lingered. The lemon made it much less offensive, though. Get the Spanish ones with the lemon in it. Super, super tasty sardines. Anyway, most canned goods are canned submerged in water.
A lot of water. In 2013, the magazine Consumer Reports, they tested 63 different cans of food to see how much of the listed weight of the product was actually loose water, water you could pour off, so as to not include the water inside the actual food. There's nothing wrong with that. They wanted to measure the loose water inside the can. The average across all 63 cans that they tested was 43%. 43% loose water and its solutes, 57% solid food. So then the engineers at Consumer Reports asked themselves, well are these companies ripping us off? How much water does it really take to can food? And what they did is they tried making their own canned chickpeas at Consumer Reports, and no matter what they did, they couldn't get the water content of the can below 35%.
That's the lowest they were ever able to go with canned chickpeas.
They just could not pack the chickpeas any tighter.
At some point, you've compressed the food
As much as you can without destroying it, and you need to fill up the remaining negative space with water to create that anaerobic environment that prevents spoilage.
So with the exception of your high tech vacuum canning, the water is necessary. The bean juice is necessary. What exactly is in it? Well, anything that dissolves out of the food during the canning process, which of course is also the cooking process. Canning necessarily involves heat to drive out that air, right? And kill all the pathogens. And anything else that dissolves out of the food during that can's extensive time on the shelf, right? That's going to be inside the bean goo. So in the case of legumes, chickpeas, beans, that water is generally going to be full of all of the soluble starches and pectins, and some proteins, and lots of probably oligosaccharides that are inside of the bean.
The contents of the can naturally trend toward equilibrium, so what is inside the beans will work its way outside the beans. If the bean juice looks and feels kind of weird and unnatural to you, that's probably just because you don't normally encounter such a liquid when it is cold or room temperature. If you heat it up, you'll recognize it as the cooking water, the gravy from a pot of beans. It's pretty much the same stuff, plus potentially a few additives. The most common additive is going to be salt. I have found conflicting information on why manufacturers add so much salt to canned food. I'm sure they all have their own reasons and it depends on the specific product. One obvious reason is simply taste.
People like salt. Salt is an essential nutrient. We die without it, and in the natural inland environment for which our bodies are evolved, salt is actually pretty hard to come by, so we are programmed to seek out salt like mad. Salt tastes good, and people are more likely to buy your product a second time if they like how it tasted. Beans especially need salt, because they don't really taste like anything else. Somebody emailed me the other day suggesting that I make an article about why we salt pasta, and he was like, "What's the chemistry of why salt makes the pasta taste better?" And I was like, dude, I think you're overthinking this. Grains are seeds, just like beans, and most seeds really don't taste like very much. We put salt on or in them to make them taste like anything.
We could do the same with sugar or acid, other highly refined foods that supply a basic taste sensation on our tongues, but we generally eat grains with other ingredients like fruits and vegetables and stuff that supply the sugar and the acid, so we make the grains taste like salt. Makes sense. Salt may play some preservative role in some canned foods, as a kind of insurance policy. If your canning instruments aren't perfectly sterilized, if your ingredients aren't super clean, you've got the salt there as a second line of defense against microbial growth. It's probably not enough salt in a can of beans to help very much on that score, but in a can of SPAM, hells yeah there's enough salt in a can of SPAM to kill any life form that might still be alive inside that "meat." It occurs to me that Achmed might not know what. SPAM is because he lives in a Muslim country and SPAM is mostly pork. It is pretty much liquified pork reconstituted with starch, usually a potato starch I think as a binder, and some sugar for taste, and sodium nitrite to set the pink color of the meat. And so, so very much salt.
I love SPAM, I do, but it is so salty. And whether the company would admit to it or not, I'm sure that the salt is there partially as a microbial insurance policy. An antimicrobial insurance policy.
Most canned foods are pretty salty, and
If you have high blood pressure or other reason why you need to really watch your salt intake, well that's a good reason to discard the canning liquid.
If you rinse off your beans and
Then cook them with fresh water and vegetables and such, you probably will get a significantly lower sodium product, assuming that you don't add a bunch of salt back in, which you might.
I would. I season everything to taste, because my blood pressure is excellent, and I generally don't eat way too much food. Excess salt consumption is significantly driven by excess food consumption.
Season your food well and eat less of it is what I say, but anyway. In general, there aren't a ton of preservatives in canned food, because that would defeat the entire point of canning. Canning was invented to preserve food without the use of chemical preservatives, which in the old days was salt and/or acid, and/or smoke. Pickling, smoking. We already had those, but they had their drawbacks for the reasons previously mentioned, so we invented canning to preserve food without the use of antimicrobial chemicals. What chemical preservatives do you see in modern canned goods? Generally they're going to be antioxidant chemicals like ascorbic acid, vitamin. C, or sometimes citric acid. Just because there's no air in the can doesn't mean there's no oxygen in the can.
Foods are full of oxygen, mostly in the form of water. H2O, right? That's the O. But also all kinds of organic compounds in food have oxygen like fats. They might put an antioxidant in the canning liquid to prevent oxidative reactions. That's particularly important in jarred food, because glass lets in light, and light can catalyze oxidation reactions, reactions that can discolor food, give it a funky smell, that kind of thing. Some of the ascorbic acid or the citric acid in the can could conceivably just be residue from an earlier stage of processing, like when they cut the fruit in the factory they maybe spray it or toss it with an acid to keep it from browning before it even gets to the can. The acid stops oxidation, but it also stops enzymatic reactions that are unleashed by the cutting. The heat of the canning process would probably deactivate all enzymes, but you might acidify the fruit anyway to stop enzymatic browning that could occur before the heat treating step.
But a lot of canned goods have antioxidants added. I just walked into my cupboard and I found a jar of preserved jalapeno slices, and it includes sodium metabisulfite, did I say that right? metabisulfite? I think I did. Nailed it. Sodium metabisulfite, probably used as an antioxidant to preserve the color. It is sold under the brand name LeafGreen for that purpose in canning. I suppose some of the preservatives could be harmful to you in huge amounts, like vitamin C overdose is possible, but only in huge amounts. And even then, it would probably just make you a little nauseous or give you diarrhea. The main hazard of vitamin C overdose apparently is that it gives you false blood glucose readings, and if you're diabetic and you rely on a glucose meter to manage your disease, false readings would be real bad.
And this actually comes up in the case of people, diabetics, who also megadose on vitamin C supplements to get over a cold, and it's highly questionable whether that works at all by the way, vitamin C for a cold. Anyway, check the labels on the stuff that you eat, especially if you plan to eat it in huge quantities or with great regularity. If you eat something every day, its effects could add up. But in general, I can see no particular hazard inherent in eating canning liquid, and I can find no health authority that warns against it with the exception of salty canned goods being eaten by people who need to minimize their salt intake. If you struggle with gas, intestinal gas from beans for example, rinsing away the bean goo could probably help. It's probably full of the oligosaccharides that give you gas, but so are the beans. If you drain away the bean liquid, you are in essence getting rid of some of the beans.
You get less beans.
And I suppose that could be good. It could also be good for flavor or texture of your final dish; you might not want all of the thickening power in that bean goo, or you might not want the taste. Canned goods, as awesome as they are, do tend to taste a little like dog food, and you can wash away some of that taste and replace it with fresh tasting liquids if you want. Oh, and there's sugar to think about. Canned fruit especially will contain a ton of sugar in the canning liquid. Some of it is certainly sugar that just leached out of the fruits in the can, but some of it may be added sugar. They may add the sugar as a preservative. They may add it to balance the tartness of the acid that they added as a preservative, but also they might just add it because they know that you like sugar and so do I.
And if you get too much sugar, that's a reason to drain and rinse the canned fruit. But other than that I figure, yeah, just use the canning liquid. There's certainly water soluble vitamins in there. B vitamins are water soluble. They're going to leach out of the food and into the liquid during the canning process. You'd just be throwing them down the drain if you drain the can. I think that lots of recipe writers, myself included, we just write, "Rinse and drain a can of beans," out of habit. In many cases there may be no good reason to rinse or drain the beans.
Canned goods are great. Love me some canned beans, canned tomatoes. You ever heard of the $12 million soup can? 12 million buck-ers for a can of soup? Not exactly a real can.
Brandon: Hi Adam, I'm Brandon from Houston. I have a question that's not about cooking specifically, but more about wellness in general, and it's around the topic of steroids. When I was a kid in the '80s and '90s, I remember a lot of pop culture demonization of and moralization around steroids. A good example was a GI Joe cartoon episode where one of the Joes gets addicted to steroids.
In contrast, it feels like today there is more pop culture acceptance. Life hacker articles will routinely reference gear in the bodybuilding or weightlifting community, or in your recent podcast that sparked this question, you talked about the pharmacy of performance enhancing drugs that's common in bodybuilding, and then added the addendum, "No judgment." So my two questions are, have you noticed this trend of more widespread acceptance of steroids, and do you have any speculation about reasons for it? Thank you.
Adam: Real quick, Brandon, I just want to clarify that when I said no judgment in reference to performance enhancing drugs, I did not intend that as kind of moral endorsement of steroids. I was merely saying that that particular sentence did not include any moral statement on steroids one way or another. I was simply stating the fact that most, or perhaps all top level professional bodybuilders are on an entire pharmacy's worth of drugs, with the exception of those who compete in drug tested federations, and you can always spot those people because they look like normal people; at least when they have their clothes on.
One social app that I was on recently fed me a sponsored post from some fitness content farm, and it was an article about a top level natural bodybuilder, and his picture was on there. And all of the comments on this post were from dudes being like, "This guy's a bodybuilder? He just looks like a normal, skinny guy." And against my better judgment I jumped into those comments to say, "Hate to break it to you folks, but this is what real, drug tested, natural bodybuilding competition looks like.
If you're not on drugs and you're not a one in a billion genetic freak, you can either look big and muscular in your clothes, or you can look super lean and ripped when you're naked.
You can't do both without significant pharmaceutical assistance." . And I forget what I was talking about, but whatever you heard me talk about this Brandon, I needed to establish that simple fact in whatever line of argument I was making, and I said no judgment just to make it clear that I was making a statement of fact with no opinion implied one way or another. And I suppose one reason I might do that is because I do follow body building, and also other strength sports too, and I really respect the work that those competitors put in. And the uninitiated may hear that those competitors are on drugs, and they might conclude that those competitors don't also work hard, and that is categorically false. To be an IFBB pro level bodybuilder, or to look anything like one, you have to eat seven or eight perfectly formulated and pretty disgusting meals a day. You have to train with weights extremely hard and heavy for many hours a week. You probably have to do many hours a week of cardio on top of that to get rid of your last percent or two of body fat. Most people can't just diet off all of the body fat, because your body hits this point where it converts your muscle tissue into energy rather than dipping into your remaining fat reserves.
That's an oversimplification of the process, but that's the basic idea. So you do zone two cardio, light cardio. That seems to have a different effect on the body's energy apportionment, at least at that level of muscularity and leanness. Those competitors use cardio to try to burn off that last bit of fat without triggering the catabolic effect that loses them their muscle. So to look like an IFBB pro, you have to do all of that, which is incredibly hard and painful, and you have to take a whole array of drugs; mostly hormones like anabolic steroids, and growth hormone, and maybe insulin, but also other classes of drugs like diuretics to purge subcutaneous water that obscures the muscle texture under your skin visually.
And the taking of the drugs itself
Is also quite a lot of work.
It's not laziness. They're not just cheaters trying to get out of doing the work.
First, it's really hard just to get these drugs given that they are illegal in different ways and to varying degrees in most jurisdictions. So first you've got to get them and verify that they're real. Then you've got to take them, which comes with all kinds of absolutely miserable side effects that in turn need to be managed with lots of other drugs. If all the testosterone that you're injecting is converting into estrogen, you have to take what they call aromatase inhibitors, and the side effect managers come with their own side effects, and oh what a tangled web we weave. All of that to look like a living action figure. It may be terribly misplaced effort, but it is effort. And when I mention steroids, I don't want people to get the opposite idea that drugs make it easy. Nothing about it is easy.
It may be stupid, it may be pointless, it may be vain, but it's not easy. If you want to hear about what a nightmare it is to be on anabolic steroids, go watch More Plates More Dates, the YouTube channel that began some years ago as a young man named Derek just gabbing about working out to get girls, and then it became one of the foremost venues for performance enhancing drug esoterica.
In the absence of a normal scholarly venue for this kind of conversation, More Plates More Dates has virtually become the international journal of. PED studies. And Derek says that he has gone off most PEDs by the way. I think he says that he's pretty much just taking medical testosterone replacement therapy, TRT from a doctor, because going on steroids shuts down your natural testosterone production, potentially permanently. And Derek generally warns against steroids these days, because they are apparently a nightmare to be on; but he also professes a belief that people have a right to do what they want with their own bodies, and if people are going to do steroids, the really immoral thing to do is to deprive them of the information they need to do it as safely as possible.
And for what it's worth, I agree with that sentiment 100%.
You don't solve problems by depriving competent adults of the knowledge they seek. And as you observe Brandon, they are able to get most of that PED knowledge they seek these days because we have channels like More Plates More Dates; such channels that are unmediated, or less mediated by large institutions that naturally reflect the dominant morality, which may be oriented against PEDs.
The reason Brandon that you and I grew up watching these simplistic GI Joe morality plays about the evils of steroids is that GI Joe was produced by Hasbro, a giant toy company with factories all over employing thousands of people and answering to local politicians in every community where they had a factory.
The TV show ran in what they call first run syndication, meaning it wasn't picked up by a network like NBC or ABC which then sent it out to all of their network member stations. A syndicated show is just up for sale to individual stations that can choose to air it or not. Most TV shows used to go into syndication on reruns, but some shows went straight to syndication with their debut, and that's what first run syndication means. So Hasbro had to convince hundreds of individual, locally owned and managed stations all over the country to take this cartoon, and those stations all answered to politicians, because you need a government license to broadcast over the public's airwaves. That wasn't outrageous government overreach, by the way.
Terrestrial broadcasting is impossible without some authority stepping in to say, "This person gets this frequency band, and this person gets that frequency band." Otherwise without that kind of top level coordination, everybody is just trying to broadcast on the same frequencies, and nobody hears anything but interference.
In the UK, they considered this technical problem in the early days of broadcasting, and they concluded that the government should become the broadcaster, hence the BBC in all its glory, and its problems. By the way, GI Joe did air in the UK under the name Action Force. I just found that out. We in the US, we considered this technical problem inherent in terrestrial broadcasting, and we determined that the government should hand out licenses or legal monopolies to private entities that would be the broadcasters. And in turn, for getting to profit off of the public's airwaves, these private broadcasters with licenses, these license holders, they would have to uphold certain standards and do certain public services with their broadcasting. GI Joe came out at a time in the early 1980s when esteem for the military in the US was at an all-time low following the horrific debacle of the Vietnam War.
The military was missing its recruitment goals,
The government needed to get young americans excited to go kill strangers for their country again.
And so a lot of local station
Owners probably figured that they could score some points with their government masters by airing this gi joe show for the kids that made the military look fun and cool again.
Local station owners were also prominent people in their own communities; wealthy people with wealthy, bored spouses who probably sat on all the local community boards, and they were all very worried about our nation's children and their morality. And thus, the programming they aired often reflected this dominant, elite morality that stated among other things that steroids are bad. Steroids are cheating. Nevermind that all the characters in GI. Joe cartoons were so jacked that they would've had to be on steroids were they not cartoons. Perhaps that's one reason GI Joe did the anti-steroid messages; to deflect attention away from their own complicity in the popularization of steroids. Indeed, who were the big American heroes in the 1980s? The ones that the power structure put forward as male role models for all us kids? Who were they? Sly Stallone, Arnold, Hulk Hogan.
All steroid users. Legit, you can't look like that any other way. For what it's worth, I really understand the moral panic about steroids in sports. Steroids suck to be on. They really hurt your body and probably shorten your life, and it would be terrible if everyone who wanted to play sports at a high level had to be on steroids in order to be minimally competitive. That would be bad, and that is the path that we were headed down before all of the world's big sporting organizations got pretty serious about their testing regimes. All the big sporting organizations except the IFBB, because bodybuilding without steroids is pretty much pointless. There were some famous strongmen in the late 19th, early 20th centuries before the invention of anabolic steroids, but the discipline of bodybuilding really did not take off until steroids entered the picture in the mid-20th century.
And the IFBB didn't really care about steroid use, because bodybuilding was this totally niche, pretty underground thing. Even Arnold couldn't drag bodybuilding into the mainstream, though he tried. Vince McMahon tried to drag bodybuilding into the mainstream; Vince, the recently deposed king of professional "wrestling," the WWE. I think it was still the WWF at the time the story I'm about to tell you takes place. This is before the World Wildlife Federation sued to get their initialism back. Vince loved bodybuilding. He was a bodybuilder himself, and he thought that he could use his experience with showmanship to turn bodybuilding competitions into something that masses of people would actually want to watch. So he formed the WBF, the World Bodybuilding Federation, and he reached into his very deep pockets to pay a bunch of top bodybuilders to hop over into his new federation, even though doing so would probably result in them being banned for life from IFBB competition.
Vince paid a bunch of top guys to come over into his new club, and he threw a bunch of money into an elaborate and gaudy stage presentation, and then a few months before his big WBF competition, Vince came under a bunch of political pressure to drug test the competition. Because Vince McMahon wasn't just the chairman of the WBF; he was the chairman of the WWF, a massive mainstream entertainment company that answered to all kinds of politicians and other powerful people. And in 1991, a big scandal blew up about steroids in the WWF. There was a staff ringside doctor at the WWF named George Zahorian. He was convicted of illegally supplying steroids to WWF wrestlers. Vince was under a ton of heat, and that spilled over into his new WBF bodybuilding federation. So if you want to see something really awful, search WBF on YouTube and watch the footage of these competitions from the early 90s. I believe there were only two before the whole operation went bankrupt.
All the bodybuilders had to go off their gear a couple of months before the competition to pass the drug tests, and they were still pretty big. They had size from years of training, and eating, and gear, drugs. But they had to go off the drugs, and they blew up like balloons.
Fat and water retention, inevitable without the
Drugs, and they all looked terrible, and the wwf style staging and commentary that they did was just ridiculous.
Of course one guy was allowed to stay on the sauce, and that was Gary Strydom, an Australian bodybuilder who was preordained as the new WBF champion, so he got a hall pass from. Vince and he looked pretty good, because he was still on the drugs. But anyway, that's what happens when bodybuilding tries to go mainstream. It can't, because it has drugs.
It can't have drugs and be mainstream at the same time, and there's really no point to bodybuilding without the drugs, so yeah. Now it's pretty different right? Now we have media that doesn't have to get filtered through TV stations, with FCC licenses owned by rich white dudes whose wives organize fundraisers for Nancy Reagan's Just Say No campaign or whatever. Derek from moreplatesmoredates.com, he didn't have to get anyone's permission, didn't have to bow down to any politician or other member of the entrenched power structure in order to start making videos about steroids. The only big corporation with lots of political pressure involved here is YouTube, and YouTube's greatest single innovation is not technological at all. No, YouTube's greatest single innovation is plausible deniability. "We don't make the content, the people make the content. We're just the town square, and we couldn't possibly police what all our users are doing on our platform. We don't even know what they're all doing." Trust me, somebody high up at YouTube knows about Derek at.
More Plates More Dates, but they have plausible deniability, and so the people can pretty much make their own media here, talk about whatever they want to talk about, and so steroids talk. The internet has made it possible for us to learn about all kinds of niche interests. Some of them are niche because they are forbidden by those in power, that's why they're condemned to a niche. Other topics are niche just because not a lot of people care. I did, I talked about how I had been working on that recipe for 10 years, which was true. And everybody in the comments was like, "Why did you need 10 years to figure this all out? Why didn't you just look at all of the recipes from New York pizza makers on the pizza making message boards and all of that?" And my answer is, we didn't have that when I first started trying to figure out how to make pizza.
We just didn't have that. All of that came along later.
Now the sum of all human knowledge is pretty much available for free to everyone on the internet. I think this is the biggest single reason for the rehabilitation of steroids in the public consciousness, Brandon. People are getting the chance to think for themselves a little bit more thanks to the internet, and they have developed a more nuanced opinion than, "Steroids are bad because Nancy Reagan says so.". When Derek at More Plates More Dates talks about all of the reasons steroids are pretty freaking awful and you probably shouldn't take them, his arguments are much more persuasive because he knows of what he speaks. He has actual reasons. And he doesn't tell you what to do, because he knows that life is about balancing competing interests, and he is here to help you make informed decisions and stay as safe as possible, whatever you choose to do. I think another reason steroids have become somewhat rehabilitated is because the internet has made the legal picture significantly more gray. With the internet, it's much easier now to find a doctor who will prescribe the stuff to you, thus making it legal, at least on your end.
The doc could potentially get in some trouble, depending on how radically unjustifiable the prescriptions are. But if you're as old as I am, 40, it's pretty easy now to get a doctor to prescribe some amount of anabolics to you under the guise of testosterone replacement therapy, TRT. The internet has made it easier to buy stuff from an underground lab somewhere and to have it delivered to you in the mail, which feels a lot less seedy than meeting a guy in the alley behind the gym. And the internet has made it easier to buy new, arguably legal replacements for steroids, like prohormones; compounds that aren't technically steroids, but they are metabolized into steroids in your body, at least theoretically. Those are big these days.
And then you have some relaxing of
The laws in certain jurisdictions around the world, similar to what we're seeing with cannabis.
So simple possession of anabolic steroids is
Not illegal in the uk for example.
You can't make it or sell it, or distribute it, or have it with the intent to distribute it, but you can have it for your own personal use as I understand in the UK.
I am not a lawyer, do not rely on me for legal advice, especially about countries where I do not live. Apparently gear is totally legal in Kuwait, which is one reason Kuwait has become this international bodybuilding capitol. Turkey from what I've read has some steroids legal commerce I think. I'm confused about Dubai. Larry Wheels is in Dubai and is really open about his steroid use there. Larry Wheels if you don't know is an internet famous YouTuber strongman. Really charismatic, fun guy. Does these very entertaining and impressive feats of strength, while also having a pretty damn good physique.
Usually the really strong guys don't actually look good, because real functional strength comes from your core and your butt, not from your pecs or your delts or your biceps. Those are the mirror muscles. The strongest people in the world have giant guts and giant butts, because that's where the power comes from. And he's in Dubai, and seems to work with the endorsement of the sultanate or whatever there.
He said he's still on TRT because years of steroid abuse completely nuked his balls and now he can't make his own hormones, but he's closer to normal now that he is shrinking rapidly from what he's done. Still looks awesome, still strong as a bull, but he's shrinking really fast now that he's off most of the sauce. But regardless, there are places in the world now where steroids are manufactured are sold somewhat legally for nonmedical purposes, and the internet probably makes it easier to exploit legal loopholes that run through such jurisdictions. So when you remove the seedy drug dealing aspect from the whole equation, it just starts to feel a lot less bad, and maybe it legitimately is at least a little less bad. Now all of a sudden, you have IFBB pro body builders talking openly about their cycles, their PED regimens. They used to maintain this sort of polite fiction, where everybody knows that they do it, but they didn't talk about it, at least until after they retired from active competition. But Chris Bumstead, CBum he's known as, Chris Bumstead, arguably the most popular actively competing bodybuilder in the world, recently talked somewhat openly about his usage; and he did so to try to advance what they are calling the safer use models. He came out and he said, "Look, I'm the best in the world in my division," which is the Classic Physique division.
He said, "I'm the best in the world, and I really don't take that much stuff." He said, "I've got a couple of compounds I use in very modest dosages, and I've recently reduced the dosages even more, and I still look great. I do everything under the guidance of a doctor who is checking my blood work constantly.". CBum, he is out there saying this because he sees all these kids on the internet running cycles that would kill an elephant, and they don't look half as good as him. CBum is out there saying, "Look, the reason you don't look like me isn't because you need more gear. It's almost entirely a matter of genetics. Me, CBum, I'm a genetic freak." A beautiful. Canadian Greek God CBum is, and no amount of gear will get you that physique, so don't try. Don't ruin your body forever trying to chase that with more and more drugs, because you'll never get there.
I really applaud CBum for saying all of this.
I mean, it helps that he's in
The classic physique division, where the guys are supposed to be a little smaller and more aesthetically pleasing.
They actually have a weight cap they have to meet relative to their height. So yeah, CBum doesn't have to blast a thousand milligrams of trenbolone or whatever because he does not have to be as big as the guys that compete in the open class, so it's easier for him to advance the safer use model. But I still think it's valuable what he's out there saying. I applaud you, CBum, and your commendable Canadian mustache. I'm in favor of people making their own choices about their own bodies themselves, regardless of what anybody in power says, regardless of what any paternalistic government says. And to that end, I will now tell you what I think about steroids;
No one is pushing me around to say this or not say this. I simply don't have to worry about that. I sincerely believe that no young people have any business taking steroids unless prescribed by a doctor for a legit medical reason, like to treat burns or a wasting disease, or major natural hormone deficiencies. All the things for which steroids were actually invented. There's no damn reason for a young person to be on elective gear.
All you do is risk hurting yourself. You risk enlarging your heart, damaging your organs with chronically high blood pressure, getting infections from all the injection sites or damaging your liver if you're using orals. You risk shutting down your natural hormone production. You risk growing your muscles to levels of size and strength that cannot be matched by your tendons and such, because steroids don't really help you grow all of those supporting tissues. And so, snap. Plus if you're young, especially if you're a dude, your natural hormone production is probably already off the chain. You don't need that much help, and you certainly don't need stuff that's going to make you even more crazy in the head than you are now. You can't handle the psychological effects of your natural hormones.
How are you going to handle the added effects of exogenous hormones? Your head will explode. I've never taken any PEDs so I don't know much about them, but the responsible knowledgeable people who do take PEDs pretty much all say that if you're interested in bodybuilding or strength sports, that kind of thing, you should train naturally for a decade once you're fully grown. So 18 to 28, do it naturally. See what you're working with. Find out if you even have the genetics to make it worth your while to take things to the next level. And if you're going to take it to the next level, do it under the guidance of a doctor who won't judge you, who will accept what you're doing, and commit to taking care of you no matter what. Not necessarily condone what you're doing, but accept it and commit to taking care of you no matter what. And you shouldn't be doing this until you're late 20s anyway when your body and your brain are full grown.
Your brain doesn't stop developing until your mid to late 20s. And if you do it, go on the internet and research the safer use models. Go real slowly, take very modest doses.
A little apparently goes a real long
Way with that stuff.
And I would say find a way
To do it legally wherever you live, or don't do it at all.
What a pathetic thing to go to prison for. I mean, honestly. What a selfish thing to go to prison for.
And I definitely don't think you should use steroids to cheat at sports. It is totally legitimate to try to keep PEDs out of real sports. Bodybuilding isn't a real sport, so it's an exception. It's a body modification art, and there's really very little point to it without steroids. Real, natural bodybuilding shows just aren't that interesting to watch. I'm sorry. That's not to say that there isn't cheating in bodybuilding. There are things that people absolutely consider cheating, namely site enhancements like inert oils and other substances that you inject into the muscle to temporarily inflate it like a balloon.
That's absolutely considered to be cheating, with good reason; plus it looks horrible. But maybe I only think that because I only notice it when it's been done poorly, and when the guys do it well nobody knows. Anyway, I certainly do not plan to ever take steroids, with the possible exception of medically administered TRT. I'm not on it yet. I do monitor my testosterone, because I am open to going on TRT when my natural T inevitably dips below a certain level with age. But even then, I'll only do it if a real responsible doctor will prescribe it, not some internet doctor feelgood practice out of south Florida. Sorry to tarnish your good name south Florida, but all those greasy dudes seem to be based down there. But I'll also tell you that since I got serious again about my fitness about six or seven months ago, my natural testosterone has gone up, because that's how that works.
It's a virtuous cycle. Eat less, move more as they say. I do think the just say no approach to drugs of all kinds has failed. The war on drugs must end. It has caused far more suffering than it has prevented. I'm not saying immediately legalize heroin. I think some reasonably controls are called for, just to keep the fire burning low, and I don't think we can end the war on drugs overnight. It has to end in stages, and we're doing that right now already with cannabis.
Recreational cannabis is now basically legal nationwide in the US despite what you may have heard to the contrary. You may have heard that it's only legal in certain states, certain liberal states, certain not particularly religious states. You probably heard that because you live in one of those states, or you consume media that comes from one of those states, because that's where the media comes from. But let me give you the red state report from here, deep down in the Tennessee Valley. Cannabis is legal here too now, thanks to. Delta-8. You may be wondering where the sudden explosion of legal cannabis products came from, all the CBD oils and all of that.
Well, thank farm subsidies.
Here in the US, we have a long history of massively subsidizing food production, which is good I think on balance. But it's also a good old boy network where powerful local lords from the hinterlands, they get their buddies in the government to basically pay them to not grow something. Our national legislative branch in the US might be totally paralyzed with partisan gridlock these days, but they can always be relied upon to pass the Farm Bill; the massive, sprawling, impenetrable, opaque amalgamation of farm subsidies that has to be renewed about every five years by congress. No matter what crazy stuff is in it, Republicans always vote for it because Republicans represent rural power, and the Democrats always vote for it, because the Farm Bill includes food stamps, food assistance for poor people, and free or reduced school lunches for poor kids. I don't know whose idea it was to put the Republican and Democratic sacred cows into the same massive piece of legislation, but it was freaking genius, because no matter how sclerotic the US federal government is, they always get it together to renew the Farm Bill, no matter what's in it, because it's too big and complex for anyone to actually read, and weird stuff gets into it as a result; such as language in the 2018 Farm Bill that legalized certain cannabis products, at least when it comes to federal law.
The authors of this language probably intended to legalize non-intoxicating hemp products that have all kinds of legitimate industrial and commercial value, and have been illegal in the United States purely as a result of guilt by association. But the authors of this language also created a new legal loophole where you can now make and sell legal cannabis products that are intoxicating, just as long as they don't contain Delta-9 THC, the normal intoxicating component of weed. Enterprising chemists got to work and devised an isomer of Delta-9 called Delta-8.
Isomer is the same atoms, just arranged in the molecule in a slightly different arrangement. And now, even here down in the bible belt, you can walk into a legitimate legal storefront and purchase Delta-8 gummies that will send you to space. If you are under the impression that it's not real cannabis, let me disabuse you of that notion right now; and it's actually kind of freaky, because Delta-8 has barely been studied at all, unlike normal THC which has been studied a lot. There's some old animal studies in the literature where they gave Delta-8 to dogs and got them high and watched what happens, but that's really about it, so lord knows what it actually does to people. Anyway, this is a food podcast, and I thought that it might be fun if we talked about how food and farming legislation accidentally legalized weed nationwide as it seems to have done. Though I know that many localities are looking at local laws targeting Delta-8 and similar new arrivals. It'll always be a cat and mouse game. But yeah, I do think the era of strict prohibition has manifestly failed, and it needs to end in stages; and it's already ending in stages, and I think that that's good.
That's progress. That's the safe, slow way to do it. I wish we were letting way more people out of prison than we are. Imagine rotting in a cell on nonviolent cannabis dealing convictions while people on the outside get to walk into cute little stores and buy cute little gummies now. Pretty messed up, that is. Anyway, I also don't think that you can or even should stop people from taking exogenous hormones to get stronger and leaner. They're going to do it no matter what, so the better thing is to help them do it as safely and responsibly as possible. And to that end, I support the destigmatization of steroids.