I am not a baker. I am a writer. I mint words, and sometimes I mince them.

My background is in human biology, not food. But I bake an excellent bread, better than what I could buy at any bakery around. All I need is flour, water, yeast, and salt.

Now, assume, I have no salt. So, the bread tastes insipid. But there is something that looks a bit like rock salt. In fact, it's sun-dried whitish dog shit. It can be crumbled, and added to the dough. Now, the bread does taste somehow spicy, though it's on the acrid side and lacks smoothness. Therefore, to soften the taste, I add a good amount of olive oil. But now, the dough becomes too clumpy. So I mix in some Styrofoam.

It's still not right. There is a smell of ammonium, either from the dog shit or the Styrofoam. To mask that smell, I decide to add some first-grade honey. And to improve the color of the mixture, I don't shy away from spending on saffron

Yes, I am proud of my sophisticated approach. The first-grade honey also contains bee pollen, which should aid in life extension, and the saffron will provide a golden-brown color, which, hopefully will improve the pigmentation of my skin.

Do you want to join me for breakfast?

Enough of that. I assume you got the point. The more I doctor around, the worse the result will be.

But that's exactly how some bodybuilders mess around with pharmacology. Just read the following article, reproduced on numerous websites (or get back to it after you are through my short essay).

http://www.xtrememass.com/forum/showthread.php?t=409&highlight=testosterone

http://www.timinvermont.com/fitness/test1.htm

http://www.irontrybe.com/forum/showthread.php?t=702&page=2

http://www.extremefitness.com/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/3509/Main/3509

The initial dog shit is an anabolic steroid. Just as the dog shit in the above example does make the bread more spicy, anabolic steroids do have an effect: they provide a more muscular frame.

However, just as the spiciness of the dog shit won't make the bread right, the anabolic steroid won't achieve what bodybuilders want to signal to all the women in the world: that here you have a super athletic alpha male. This is because anabolic steroids, or an oversupply of exogenous testosterone, have numerous unwanted side effects. Anabolic steroids do not improve overall health, and especially, they have a negative impact on sexual health.

And just as you cannot improve the bread any longer after you have mixed in the dog shit, regardless of the quality of each additional ingredient, you cannot really get beyond the negative impact of anabolic steroids or excessive exogenous testosterone, no matter what you spend on other medications.

The author of that pseudo scientific crap to which I have linked above, badly lacks a general understanding of the complexity of human anatomy and physiology. It is not that, for example, an anabolic steroid has seven side effects, for each of which you can take another medication which precisely would cancel or revert a particular side effect. The anabolic steroid, as well as all the other medications referred to in the linked-to article, have a wide systemic impact. The organs, the function of which is altered, range from the hypothalamus to the hypodermis, and we just don't know how each of the powerful chemicals known as medicines interferes with any of the one million different proteins that are found in the human body, or what precisely it does along the approximately 100,000 kilometers of blood vessels found in each of us.

An important distinction has to be made between biotics that improve health, and xenobiotics that counteract a specific disease. There is no question that some foods are more supportive of general or sexual health than others, and herbal extracts or herbal supplements can provide the benefits of certain plants in a more concentrated form.

But the approach of pharmacology is different. The principal idea in pharmacology is not to make good health even better. The aim is at very specific conditions that are to be treated with very specific chemicals. The research procedure is to first see whether a specific chemical ameliorates a specific condition, and then to examine whether all the other effects aren't so severe that the result would be "disease cured, patient dead".

If a person is in danger of dying from heart failure within the next few minutes, it is justified to apply a chemical medication, even though it is very likely that the medication will cause liver problems in the long run.

In principal, synthesized chemical medications are negative for overall health, though the may cure a specific disease. And because optimal sexual function depends heavily on overall health, almost all pharmaceuticals impair sexual function.

On another note, only lay people have confidence into "life extension medicine" that makes them dream of an eternal life on earth. Physicians know that it won't happen for any of those alive today. We are hundreds of years away from being able to regulate our bodies in a way that we could defy death through aging. Therefore, all we can strive for is to ruthlessly get the best out of life. That is: immorality instead of immortality.