Testosterone: Do We All Need a Boost?

The modern testosterone craze

0:00Should you take testosterone? Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and this is Science Versus.

0:12All over the internet, people are saying that you need to be thinking about your testosterone. Taking tea used to be something mostly done by bodybuilders, but now it's pretty mainstream, with prescriptions for tea going up more than 10 times over the last two decades. That's according to an analysis from the New York Times. And our obsession with testosterone reached new heights when earlier this year, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that he wants to screen soldiers for low testosterone in order to create a high-T department of war. Why?

0:49As we know, the modern battlefield is brutal and unrelenting. It requires and demands maximum psychological and mental readiness. And online, you'll hear that we're in the midst of a testosterone crisis, with T levels apparently plummeting among men, who say that it's making them miserable. There's tons of videos out there where young guys give each other tips on signs to look out for to show that your testosterone is low. You get anxious out of nowhere, you can't grow facial hair, you stop caring about a lot of

1:21things, and you're awake at 3am every single night. Influencers tell us that women need to be thinking about their testosterone too, especially after menopause. And loads of folks, including celebrities like Joe Rogan and Halle Berry, swear that once they took extra testosterone, their life got better. They say their sex life improved, they felt stronger and more energised. Yeah, it makes a big difference. F*** yeah. My brain fog basically disappeared. My libido came back. I actually feel like a man. I don't let s*** slide. I feel like I have a lot more work ethic,

1:56more motivation, and I just want to beat my s*** all day. Many women tell me they have better focus, they feel like they want to do more things than they did before, and they finally feel like themselves again. So what is going on here? Should we all be worrying about testosterone and taking a little tea on the side? Or is this toxic masculinity on, well, steroids? When it comes to testosterone, there's a lot of… I just want to beat my s*** all day.

2:25But then, there's science.

2:32Science vs. Testosterone is coming up. If you have a testosterone-curious friend, share this episode with them. Let them know the real science on testosterone, which is coming up after the break.

2:51Your business is growing, and so is your to-do list. But updating the CRM will not be on it. Because with HubSpot, updates happen automatically, so you can build demand and move deals without all the admin. Learn more at HubSpot.com. Into the wild, the Cartier panther encounters a shimmering crocodile, a lonely lovebird, a breathless zebra, and a restless tiger. Welcome back. Today on the show, the science of testosterone, been in the news a lot recently,

3:35and all over social media to tell us all about it. We have, of course, the beefiest, buffiest, buffiest, science journalist, senior producer, Rose Rimbler. Hi, Wendy. Hi, Rose.

Does testosterone build muscle

3:50Let's just jump in, and let's look at the biggest, literally, the biggest claim out there about testosterone, which is, can it make you stronger? Bigger muscles stronger. Bigger muscles. That's right. That's right. Which, you know, lots of people want right now. Could it help? Um, so I talked about this with a scientist who specializes in studying testosterone. In fact, Wendy, he's responsible for some of the seminal research in this space.

4:19Is that a pun on semen? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I got it. Good, good, good. Yeah. Yeah. I'm Shalinder Basin, and I'm professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School. Shalinder said that early in his career, there was actually a big debate among scientists about this very question. Whether taking testosterone actually does make you beefier or more athletic. So on the one hand, you had athletes that were getting into trouble for taking anabolic steroids, which are basically like souped up derivatives of testosterone. They're also sometimes called

4:55androgens. So take the famous case of an Olympic runner named Ben Johnson. Johnson. This was in the late 1980s. He was a sprinter, had a record, broke the records, and he was using anabolic steroids. He admitted to it, was disqualified. But it was all over the news. Rumors have persisted about Johnson, who set staggering records in the past 18 months. Now those rumors appear to be confirmed. The implications are enormous. It's a very sad day, you know, for athletics as a whole.

5:28So, even back then, they knew

5:34testosterone could make someone a faster runner. That's why you weren't allowed to take it, right? It's funny, like, in the sports world, that was believed widely, so much so that the Olympic committee was like, no, no, you can't take that. It's not fair. But in the science world, it was not yet widely accepted that this was even true. So, Shalander brought up the case of Ben Johnson because, you know, this was in the 80s. He was sort of beginning his career. And that made a big impression on him because that same year that Ben Johnson was disqualified for using a steroid,

6:07there was this paper that came out by a respected endocrinologist that said, there's no evidence that androgens have anabolic effects. They increase muscle mass or strength or performance. The implication being that people who are abusing anabolic steroids are misguided. There were some studies that I looked at this and found they often didn't really find an effect. But people in the, you know, the world of athletics, they would look at these studies and they'd be like, well, yeah, you didn't use a high enough dose. This is not the dose that

6:40we would expect people in the bodybuilding community, for example, to use. Uh-huh. So, Shalander and some colleagues, they wanted to get to the bottom of this question. So, they designed this great study. So, they gave big doses of testosterone to healthy men. These were guys in their 20s and 30s. They got about 40 people. Some of them got testosterone, but some of them got placebo. And they also had some of the guys lift weights, and some of the guys didn't do any exercise. This went on for 10 weeks. Meanwhile, they were

7:16like monitoring the guys' diets, making sure they were eating about the same number of calories, same protein. So, it was pretty thorough. And they were checking to see at the end of the 10 weeks, did people's muscles get bigger? Could they lift more weight? Surely. It must work. Perfect. Well, here's what happened. Okay. So, first of all, everybody who weight trained saw an improvement. They got bigger and stronger. Not too surprising. Great. Thank you. But the effect was a lot bigger for the guys on T versus the guys on placebo. So,

7:48they had been doing stuff like squats with barbells. Mm-hmm. And at the end of the trial, the guys on T could squat 40% more weight, while the guys on placebo, only 20% more. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I know it's so hard to know what's real and what's not, but there's a whole concept in weightlifting around whether you're juiced or whether you're natural. Yeah. And you see these guys and so clearly juiced up with testosterone. Yeah. If you were here to tell me that this is all placebo, I mean, like…

8:21That would be wild. Right. But, okay. So, it is real. It's real. And even the guys that didn't do any weightlifting but were on T saw gains. Yeah. They, you know, they sat on their asses for 10 weeks but took T. They actually put on slightly more muscle than the guys who went to the gym and lifted weights but were on placebo. But were not, oh, not taking testosterone. Wow, that's how good it is. Which is totally unfair. Totally unfair. Mm-hmm. So, Shalander and his team, they wrote all this up and put it in a paper.

8:54It was published in New England Journal of Medicine July 4th, 1996. And it immediately changed the academic view. After that, nobody has ever questioned this. Yeah. And since then, there have been plenty of other studies showing this and showing that you don't have to be a cis man for this to work. Researchers have also shown that adult women who take T will put on muscle as well as transgender men. And do we know exactly how it works? How is testosterone stimulating muscle growth? So, we know that the testosterone will actually tell your stem cells to become muscle cells.

9:28And so, that turns them into the fibers that make up your muscles. They literally get thicker because of this. That's crazy. It really does work. Testosterone. Now, I'm guessing we're going to talk about the risks later in the show. No. That's the end of the episode, actually. Great. Go for it. Live your dreams. Hack your muscles. But, yeah. But before we get to the risks, let's look at some of these other claims.

Aggression and roid rage

9:53Okay. So, the next one I want to talk about is the idea of testosterone making you more aggressive. Because a lot of guys online, when they talk about this, they make it sound like you're going to go from, like, Keanu Reeves and Bill and Ted to Keanu Reeves and John Wick.

10:13I would say John Wick was fairly even-keeled. I don't know if he was angry, if I were to get into the psychology of Keanu Reeves. But I... But he was an ass-kicker. But he was an ass-kicker. Excellent. Yes. And there is this concept of roid rage, right? This idea, you take a bunch of steroids, you get angry, you get mad. You get even. Yes. Is it true? I talked about this with Justin Coray. He is a social psychologist at Nipissing University in Ontario, Canada.

10:47This is a hot topic. Hot topic in the U.S. right now. Justin's watching the news. I like it. A scientist with a finger on the pulse. Yes. And actually, he's been studying testosterone and aggression for his whole career. And what he says is, like, first of all, there's a lot of reason to think testosterone is tied to aggression. You know, think about males, male animals fighting for mates, like deer, you know, locking antlers. You can probably visualize that right now. Very classic example.

11:17And that is testosterone-fueled behavior. We know that because if you castrate those deer stags, I guess, they no longer do that. That's an experiment that's been done. And, you know, when you castrate a male animal, you're basically taking away his testosterone. Yes. But the story of testosterone is a lot more complex than that, and that's especially true in people. And this is what Justin studies. So let me tell you how Justin studies aggression in the lab. Great. He has people play this game with this super fun-sounding name.

11:53Point Subtraction Aggression Paradigm. We don't tell them it's called that, but we just tell them it's a computer game they're playing. Point Subtraction Aggression Paradigm. Paradigm. Great. In terms of, like, how fun this game is, I would put it somewhere between, like, Pong and that test that they make you do at the eye doctor to check if you have glaucoma.

12:18Okay. Okay. So we're a far cry from Zelda. Yeah. How does it work? So you get a keypad. It has a few buttons on it, and you've also got a computer screen. You're told to hit a button on your keypad 100 times. When you hit it 100 times, you get one point. And Justin gives people about 10 minutes to do this. So at the end of the 10 minutes, you're going to get paid based on how many points you got. So you get 50 cents a point. So if you get, you know, 20 points, you're getting 10 bucks, right?

12:51You press 100 times, you get 50 cents. Got it. Okay. So people, they want those 50 cents. So here's where the aggression part comes in. Justin tells you that you're competing against somebody else in another room. This is actually not true. It's just, like, the computer being random. But you're told that this person you're competing against can actually steal your points and thus your money and keep it for themselves. And you get a flash on the screen when that happens. You can take points away from that person, but you don't get to keep their points for yourself.

13:26So they can steal money from you. You can take away their money from them, but you don't get to keep their money. So it's, like, unfair. It's like a rigged game. Oh, it's just vindictive. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Okay. So the only purpose of stealing points is to get revenge on the other guy. And, in fact, you're wasting time hitting a button because you're not getting anything. You're not getting any financial or any points. You're not getting anything, any actual reward from it. The reward you're getting is an intrinsic reward of you got back at them, right?

13:58Why would somebody take points from the other player if they don't get the points added to their total? Because they're pissed off. You know, it sounds a little bit silly, but scientists have studied this a number of times and found this is a pretty good indicator of aggression. They've even found that in people who are violent in real life when they take this test, they tend to score higher in terms of, like, all the revenge point hitting. Okay. Justin says he can even see this when he watches people play this game. They're, like, sitting back. They're hitting your buttons.

14:29Like, they're cool, right? Hitting your buttons, hitting your buttons. And then when they get stolen from them, like, when you see them get provoked, they, like, lean forward and they start playing harder. All right. So now enter testosterone. The testosterone, yes. So Justin has done these studies where he gives people a dose of testosterone and sees what does it make them play this game more aggressively. Okay. Or placebo. So he'll have some people get either a testosterone or a placebo and see what happens.

15:01Mm-hmm. Wendy, what is your prediction? You know, I guess based on everything we've heard about testosterone, one might expect that if you get a bump of testosterone, it would make you press the revenge button more often, right? You would think that. In reality, that's not true for everyone. Mm-hmm. So what Justin has found in multiple studies is that it does seem to make some people more aggressive if they've got certain personality traits. So he'll give these, like, personality tests and finds that for people who tend to be more impulsive and more dominant, they're more likely to get more aggressive with this testosterone bump.

15:43Mm-hmm. So if you are someone who likes to have power and influence over others, someone who's hyper-competitive or someone who's, yeah, I won't even use any examples of people that I would think are high on dominance, but I think you get the point, right? Certain world leaders, perhaps? Right, right. I think probably all of them. Right. Okay. You put them in this little lab, give them some extra testosterone, and it will do something to make them press that revenge button more often.

16:17Uh-huh. But then if people had other personality traits, I guess lower on dominance, lower on aggression more generally. Didn't make a difference. It did not make a difference. This is for just cis men? I couldn't find any study on women that did exactly this, like tried to take into account personality traits. But there are studies looking at aggression and testosterone in women. It tends to be more true for men that testosterone can increase aggression. For certain kinds of men. For certain kinds of men. This is interesting because I think in the data, researchers have also looked at this in trans men who take testosterone as gender-affirming care.

16:57And in some of those men, you see an increase in aggression. Uh-huh. And others, they didn't feel that at all. Yeah. So again, we see variation in the human spirit, which I guess isn't too surprising. Exactly. I mean, there was this other study that had guys take tea and had them take journal, like write journal entries about how they were feeling and had their partners or significant others also assess if they change, if their mood changed.

17:27And found that like it didn't happen for everybody. But a couple of guys had bad reactions. Like one guy had to even like leave the study because they were worried about them. And there's a study in cis guys. Yeah, yeah. So this idea of roid rage, it's not a complete myth. It does happen to some people. And that is probably what created this story that for everyone, you take testosterone, you'll get mad. But actually, it doesn't affect everyone in that way.

17:58And the science tells us that. When someone asks me, well, when you give testosterone, it's going to make everyone, it's going to make them aggressive. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. Not everybody. Not everybody. Up next, let's look at testosterone and sex drive. Yes. Will it make you a total horndog?

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Sex drive and hormone levels

20:34Welcome back. Today we're talking about testosterone. Senior producer Rose Rimler has promised to tell us whether taking a bit of tea can turn us into whore dogs. I would have said horn dogs. No, that's what I said. I said horn dogs.

20:54I didn't say whore dogs. Okay. All right. Either way, how does testosterone affect sex drive? Okay, Wendy. You need to hold your horn dogs. Okay. Just for a minute. Okay, okay. Right. Before we dive into that, I just do want to say that, you know, one reason people are really concerned here is because of this idea that testosterone levels are going down in dudes. There's never been a worse time in modern history to be a young man hormonally.

21:25Testosterone levels are plummeting. A 25-year-old guy has the same testosterone levels as his grandpa did at age 40. Which is a problem. It's a massive problem in men. Yes, yes. The so-called testosterone crisis and whatnot. So, for example, one study looked at testosterone levels of men between the ages of 15 and 39 in 1999 compared with men of that same age in 2015 and found that the modern dudes had about 25% less testosterone on average.

21:5525% less testosterone, same age group. Uh-huh. Yeah, and other studies have shown, you know, different numbers, but similarly, like this decline. Interesting. So, what's causing it? There's something in the water? I mean, a lot of people point to, you know, endocrine disrupting chemicals. The microplastics. Yeah, maybe stress, a more stressed-out society, a more sedentary society. These have all been floated around. But the point, I think, for our conversation today is that

22:26with this sort of decline in testosterone levels broadly, it could be pushing more men into the too-low category. And by too-low, you mean when scientists study large groups of people and compare the health of a group of men, they find that there is a cut-off point where your testosterone is low and it starts to be associated with various health effects. Yes. Is that right? Right. I mean, the normal healthy range of testosterone is pretty broad, actually.

22:58But down below a certain threshold, you can get symptoms like low energy, feeling down, getting crappy sleep, gaining weight, brain fog, and low libido. So, the question is, if that's you, should you take T? Right. Will it help? So, the best study we have on this comes from this group of studies called the T-Trials, led partly by our old friend, Shalander Pazin. We heard from him earlier in the show. He and his colleagues in the 2000s, they enrolled this big group of older guys with low, clinically low testosterone, and they had them take either a testosterone gel or a placebo gel.

23:34They would rub it on their backs every day for a year. Mm-hmm. And they were tracking stuff like their sex life. How do you find out about that? You can't sit in the bedroom and take notes. So, he had these diaries. So, people jotted down for a whole week all types of sexual activity, you know, whether they masturbated or partnered activity or just whether they watched an X-rated video or Playboy magazine, etc. So cute that he says X-rated and not porn. Really dates the study.

24:06I guess they could get a videocassette. Yeah, exactly. Went to the video store with the sticky floor. So, what did he find? All types of activities were recorded. And those diaries showed clearly that all types of sexual activities improved. So, the guys in the testosterone arm at the end of the trial, about 20% of them reported that their libido was much better, and that's compared with less than 10% in the placebo group. Uh-huh. Testosterone did improve when they had low testosterone, clinically low.

24:41And that, you know, really makes sense because we know that men who have severely low testosterone, like guys with Klinefelter syndrome, that's where you're born, XXY instead of XY, they make very little testosterone. One of the symptoms of that syndrome is a very low or non-existent sex drive. Um, we also know that trans men often report a boost in their sex drive when they start taking T, at least at first. It tends to settle down over time. So, it totally makes sense. Yeah. So, I think the take-home is really if you have clinically low levels of testosterone,

25:16taking more to get you into that healthy range can boost your sex drive. But if you are already in the healthy range, and like you mentioned, guys in the healthy range of testosterone, some have higher, some have lower, all in the healthy range. And we know from study after study after study that when you ask those guys in the healthy range, how often do you think about sex? How often are you having sex? How often are you watching X-rated videos?

25:49And then you test their testosterone, having a little bit more or a little bit less actually isn't correlated with a higher sex drive. That's right. Yeah. That's another really good clue that if you're in the normal testosterone range, it doesn't really matter. And this brings us to our next question, which is, does testosterone help women with their sex drive? So, some of our best data on like women and testosterone and sex drive come from East Germany, back before the collapse of the Soviet Union. So, back then the state was actually giving their athletes steroids in order to win more Olympic medals.

26:23And they were giving their female athletes especially high doses of something called terabinol and documenting the effects. And those documents became available, you know, later on. Right. And they show that women getting these big doses of testosterone essentially got super horny. In fact, some women reported that this was unbearable and asked to quit sports rather than keep taking it.

26:53Wow. I know. And a more modern survey of female users of anabolic steroids that I found, surveyed them and asked them about their sex drive. And a lot of them said the same thing, that it really made their sex drive go up, but they didn't necessarily like it all that much. Now, both, I mean, I don't think we want to call what happened in East Germany a study. But in both cases, there's no placebo control. No. I mean, these are high doses, though. Like, we're talking about doses where you can grow more body hair,

27:27your voice can deepen, you can get enlargement of the clitoris. The doses that I think most of the influencers are talking about when they're like, you're a woman with low sex drive, you should get on testosterone, they're much lower. And we do have a placebo control trial to talk about when it comes to that. Okay. There's a drug company that tested this. They had women who said that they had a distressingly low libido, randomized them to wear either a testosterone patch or a placebo patch for a year.

27:58These were all post-menopausal women. The women who wore the testosterone patch reported about one more satisfying sexual experience per month. Okay. One more sexually satisfying experience per month, I guess. Not kicking that out of bed. I'm not sure. No miracles. No miracles. But can help. But can help. All right. And just quickly, one final thing I want to look at, one final claim that I see everywhere, is this idea that taking testosterone will, like, put a lot more pep back in your step,

28:28give you a lot more energy.

Energy claims and reality

28:29Yes.

Energy claims and reality

28:30Yes. So, this is another thing that Challender and his team looked at in the tea trials. Mm-hmm. It was energy.

28:37And other studies have looked at this as well. And the result is always kind of like sad trombone. You know? Like, wah, wah. Oh. In what way? Well, for example. Put some numbers behind our sad trombone. For example, in the tea trials, the team measured what they called vitality by giving guys a questionnaire that asked them stuff like, how tired did they feel? How functional were they day-to-day? Say, a max score on this questionnaire would be 108 points.

29:08Mm-hmm. And the team decided before the study that a meaningful effect would be an improvement of four points. Okay. It didn't clear that hurdle. They saw a little bit of improvement, but the effect was really small. And Challender said that surprises him because when he treats patients with low T and gives them, you know, testosterone supplementation, he says they often tell them that they feel more energetic after they start therapy. And, you know, I've been the author on many of these studies, and I'm always surprised by it's such a small effect.

29:41Yeah, it's very underwhelming. Very underwhelming, isn't it? Mm. Well, the placebo is a wonderful thing, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, for all kinds of people, for all kinds of things, you hear like it's basically going to cure everything that's wrong with you. And, you know, we hear about it so much for menopause symptoms. This is something that came up a lot, like your brain fog and, you know, your focus and all that. We don't actually have any research to back that up, but we do have our studies that don't have control groups, and you really need one because of the placebo effect from testosterone.

30:12Or they're funded by some clinic that's shilling testosterone. This is what you're finding in the post-menopausal research space as well. That's right.

Risks and infertility

30:21So then what are the risks? What are the risks? Is it time to get to the risks? You've mentioned your clitoris might enlarge. Yeah. Where are—what else could happen? So in people who have testicles, if you take testosterone, you know, give yourself a big dose of testosterone, you know, chronically, you take it all the time, your brain is going to sense that you have plenty of testosterone, and it'll stop making your own testosterone. It'll stop the homegrown stuff. And that brings us to our biggest, most obvious risk, and that's infertility.

30:53The reason that leads to infertility is that in order to make viable sperm, you need testosterone to be coming from the testes, and that's not going to happen if you've turned off the tap that comes from your brain. And people think testosterone equals masculinity, equals high sperm count. Actually, exact opposite. The exact opposite. Taking testosterone can lower your sperm count to the point where you are infertile, right?

31:24Yes. And this whole thing about sperm and about shutting off your own testosterone, it's not trivial, and it's not necessarily super short-term. I talked about this with Richard Aukes. He is an endocrinologist and professor at the University of Michigan. And this actually came up when we were talking about this idea of supplementing soldiers with testosterone. But, you know, if you're taking testosterone, you probably shouldn't be on the front lines fighting, right? Why is that? Well, what if you get captured, right? Because remember, taking testosterone, you're going to then become dependent on it.

31:58You're going to suppress your own production, and then you're going to have to take that for the rest of your life. So, if you get captured and you don't have access to your testosterone, then you're going to be even lower than you were before you got treated. That's permanent? Well, I mean, it depends how long you use it. Yeah. Wait, it doesn't, the moment you stop taking your testosterone supplements, your body forgets that it's got to go up again? Well, it depends on how long you've been on the testosterone supplements.

32:30It depends on how much you've been taking. Um, but it can take a while to come back online, and it can be permanently suppressed, even when it does come back online, including your sperm counts. Wow. That's a huge, that's a huge risk. It's a huge risk. And especially when I think about, like, teenagers taking this stuff, like, oh my God. But yeah, I mean, also, you can actually go through withdrawal after stopping testosterone replacement therapy or stopping, you know, steroids.

33:01Um, you can get symptoms like headache, fatigue, restlessness, insomnia, feeling sad, low sex drive, all this stuff that you're supposedly trying to avoid by taking T can actually end up getting worse after you stop the testosterone therapy. Mm-hmm. And then, what about other effects to your heart, um, to your, the rest of your body, while you're taking the testosterone? Yeah, so people will talk about acne that comes up, uh, breast tenderness. Um, and also, if you are someone who is capable of becoming pregnant, you get pregnant while you're

33:35on testosterone, it could harm the fetus. It's another big thing to think about. Mm-hmm. Um, when it comes to stuff like your heart, your prostate, if you have one, there has been a lot of concern that testosterone, taking it, could, could be, um, bad, like, give you heart attacks or prostate cancer. But we do have a study, a drug company did a few years ago, that found no difference in heart attacks or prostate cancer for guys taking moderate doses of testosterone compared with a placebo over four years, which is somewhat reassuring.

34:05Okay. Yeah. But it might be a different story with much higher doses. So, researchers have seen damage to people's hearts and even brains after they've been juicing for a while. So, there are certainly downsides. Okay. Um, so I think that can be really downplayed by people who promote this stuff. For sure. And it doesn't help that a lot of the information we get about taking testosterone is coming from people who are selling it. Mm-hmm. A lot of experts have pointed out that this craze for testosterone really took off around

34:37the year 2000, which was about the time that drug companies figured out how to put it in a gel. Mm-hmm. And so, you didn't have to just inject it. So, there's this new product that would be a lot more, um, you know, appealing to a lot more people. To people to take. Right. Yeah. And so, there's been a ton of advertising since then to people and to doctors. Yes. And now, the advertising is coming through your favorite influencer and their favorite affiliate code. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um, right.

35:08So, there's this push by pharma companies. And I think it's dovetailing with this other social change we're seeing.

Unrealistic masculine ideals

35:14Uh, we're going to go back to the guys now. A lot of researchers argue that we've actually seen a shift in what the ideal male body is supposed to look like. Oh, for sure. Over the last few decades. Um, so, they've done stuff like they've taken action figures of today and compared them with action figures of the past. And they found that toy makers are actually making them, like, buffer. Yeah. I mean, even if you look at Heyman, Heyman is, probably looks like a twink these days.

35:45Right? Right? There's not even a vein in sight, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. That's crazy. It's crazy. They've also compared centerfolds in Playgirl magazines, uh, over the years and found that the male models featured there, they're getting more muscular. For sure. For sure. So, these online, you scroll and these huge guys, you don't look that huge anymore. They, that looks like that's what a normal guy is supposed to be.

36:15And that, whereas in the past, you, you think, wow, that's a bodybuilder. Yeah. And this is something that Shalander really cares about and brought up and talked to me about. Um, because he, he thinks what's going on here is we're getting this, like, obsession with this very narrow and unrealistic idea of what masculinity is. What it means to be a man, a successful man, a good man. I've seen some, uh, young men on social media talking about trying to get high T.

36:45They're perfectly healthy, but like, I want to be high T. Maybe they take T or maybe they're just trying to boost their T in other ways, but they really are fixated on their testosterone. And sometimes I think like, I feel like you need an older, wise, knowledgeable man to give you some advice. So I'm thinking you would be a great person. So if you could give some advice to these, these guys, these young guys, what would you say to them? I want to put my hands on them, hug them and tell them you have such a perfect, beautiful body. It is so perfect.

37:17It's beautiful in its perfection. You don't need testosterone to be happy or healthy or have a sense of wellbeing, right? And, and, and so I think, I think these young men are struggling and, and they just need a hug and, and some reassurance that they are beautiful, their bodies are perfect and testosterone isn't going to make them happy or more successful.

37:46That's science versus. How many citations are in this week's episode, Rose Rimla? This week we have 83 citations. And if people want to see them, where should they go? They can click on the link to our transcript and they'll find that link in our show notes. And if you have someone in your life, they need to hug, they need to know how beautiful their body is. Share them this episode. They don't need testosterone. They need science. Thanks, Rose. Thanks, Wendy. Oh, and finally, if you are still thinking about the fact that children's toys have been

38:20getting more and more muscly, not to mention, of course, these images that we're seeing online, just super, super muscly men. Well, I had this amazing chat this week with the science educators behind ASAP Science, Mitch Moffat and Greg Brown. And we were talking about this growing mental health condition called bigorexia. And it really made me question my own habits at the gym. I think it's a really fascinating conversation. It's out now. It's on YouTube. We're going to put a link in the show notes.

38:51So please go check it out. And Mitch and Greg have their own podcast. It's called Side Note. That is where I first heard about this condition, bigorexia. So you should totally go check it out. This episode was produced by Rose Rimler with help from Meryl Horne, Akedi Foster-Keyes and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Wendy Zuckerman, me, is the executive producer. Fact-checking by Marlo Starling. Video editing and sound by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Thanks to the researchers we spoke to for this episode, including Dr. Kathleen Casto,

39:23Dr. Carol Hooven, Professor Ruth Wood, Dr. Stephanie Page, Professor Sari Van Anders, Dr. Adam Staniland and Professor Anthony Hackney. Thanks to Humdinger Studios in Melbourne and Wolf Island Studios in New York City. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're on YouTube, we're on TikTok, we're on Instagram as well. Come and say hello. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time. Your business is growing and so is your to-do list.

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