Fried off that sh*t that rock stars die from - Part 2: The effects of alcohol and drugs on fat and muscle

Back again with a pretty belated part 2. Part 1 talked alcohol, part 2 is getting a little more shady as we discuss substances that (for the most part) are illegal. As mentioned in the first part, this isn't intended to be a full run down of the effects of these substances on every system in your body (that would require a hefty, hefty tome) this is just a jocose little look at drugs through the lens of a fitness and vanity, with a few other little interesting tidbits thrown in. It is worth a note that the literature on illegal drugs is pretty scant and what is out there seemingly doesn't like to agree, I've tried to piece together some semi-coherent information, but I should say that most of what you read should be taken with a pinch of salt. So bump that Danny Brown again and read on.

Tobacco/Nicotine

Cigarettes were good for you back in those days. So was casual racism.

The old cancer sticks. Any idiot knows puffing on loosies isn't going to do any part of you very much good but I'll provide a quick run down for anyone whose health awareness is stuck in the 40s. The main terrible shit smoking does to you is to significantly raise the risk of cardiovascular diseases, cancer (particularly throat, mouth and lung) and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases. Lesser terrible shit pertaining to vanity includes making your skin paler and more prone to wrinkles (due to vitamin A depletion and reduced blood supply), making your teeth and gums yellow and your breath smell awful. Pertaining to fitness, the aforementioned pulmonary diseases will completely screw with your breathing, but even a light smoker is going to have a less air due a lowering of the surface area of the lungs and a decreased level of aerobic fitness due to carbon monoxide hogging your red blood cells and preventing oxygen from doing its thing. The worst is for the dudes (this is going to a be a repeating theme, drugs are made for girls it seems); smoking raises your risk of erectile dysfunction by 50%. Let that sink in. That means that the only fun form of cardio isn't even an option. Fuck that....oh wait.

Strangely, it's not all bad news (but the bad news is pretty fucking bad), because nicotine, the fella that causes the physical addiction to tobacco, is actually a pretty cool little molecule. There are a few things that it does when it gets into your brain, one is to mimic acetylcholine (which was discussed in my supplement article) and activate acetylcholine receptors. This has an increase on cognition and causes the release of catecholamines (adrenaline and such) which increase fat-burning, it also releases dopamine which is responsible for its addictive nature. Nicotine also acts as a anti-oestrogenic, inhibiting aromatase; this is potentially good news for men as most guys these days have woefully low T and high oestrogen (of course this doesn't come close to making amends if you can't get a hard on). Nicotine is also an oxidative compound in your body, this is generally not a good thing, but it appears to act in a hormetic nature and may actually be anti-inflammatory overall.

Cancer is a great way to drop those last few pounds.

Smoking is well known for its appetite suppressing or weight loss effects and was in fact promoted to women on this premise back in the days when you could say whatever you wanted in advertisements. As just mentioned, nicotine increases fat burning through a catecholamine release, it also works on beta-adrenergic receptors to up-regulate fat-burning in a similar way to ephedrine (albeit far less powerfully). It has been shown in large scale studies that light smokers have lower BMIs than non-smokers, this is believed to be due to "increasing the metabolic rate, decreasing metabolic efficiency, or decreasing caloric absorption (reduction in appetite), all of which are associated with tobacco use." However, heavy smokers tend to have a higher BMI, this is generally because heavy smokers have awful lifestyles and terrible diets to go along with their other shitty habits, so become large masses of adipose and disease. While smoking and weight loss might be correlated, in general the news is not good. There is increasing evidence of smoking leading to increased insulin resistance and accumulation of visceral fat (that is the dangerous fat between your organs) with smokers showing a greater waist-to-hip ratio than non-smokers. The fact that you become more insulin resistant is also bad news as your cells become unable to use insulin correctly, which is very bad news for anyone that wants to gain muscle and paves the way to type 2 diabetes. So, all in all, smoking sucks; you knew this, I'm just confirming that it will make you skinny-fat and limp-dicked.


Cannabis

Marijuana, weed, pot, chronic, grass, kush, dope, green, cheeba, reefer, skunk, tical, sticky icky icky, Mary Jane, bud, dank, herb... whatever you know it as, most people are familiar with the flowering buds of the cannabis sativa, indica or ruderalis plant, which are generally dried and smoked. So what does smoking eighths of grape-ape mean for your gains? Well, the appetite increasing effects of cannabis are pretty well known; get lifted, get the munchies, eat a box of cereal. Standard stoner procedure. While the anecdotal evidence for this is strong enough to be pretty much irrefutable, it has been tested in a clinical environment. In this study a bunch of people were kept in a controlled environment for 13 days, the researchers got half of them to blaze up twice daily and tracked all food intake:

"Smoked active marijuana significantly increased total daily caloric intake by 40%. Increased food intake was evident during both private and social periods. The increase in caloric intake was due to an increased consumption of snack foods as a consequence of an increase in the number of snacking occasions. There was no significant change in caloric consumption during meals. The principal increase within the category of snack foods was in the intake of sweet solid items, e.g., candy bars, compared to sweet fluid, e.g., soda, or savory solid items, e.g., potato chips. Increases in body weight during periods of active marijuana smoking were greater than predicted by caloric intake alone."

The snack food industry is a big fan of weed.

40% is a pretty hefty amount to be increasing your calories in any situation, but that last sentence deserves a second read; body weight increased by even more than would be predicted by the 40% raise in calories, likely due to a decrease in energy used for movement as the participants slothed out on the sofa watching Spongebob (I assume). From this evidence, we can likely conclude that for anyone looking to lose fat or generally look good, taking blunts to the face is not the best idea.

There is a bit of cognitive dissonance here however in that most stoners I know are skinny dudes. All scientific literature I could find talked of the appetite increasing effects of weed and subsequent weight gain in controlled trails, but if I may, I'm going to propose my own theory based on personal observations. The trials tended to be on naive users, who smoked, had an increase in appetite, ate more, then gained weight. Simple enough. However, as mentioned, a large amount of experienced users tend to have fairly low BMIs (albeit with undesirable body compositions). My belief is that these users still experience the appetite up-regulating effects (i.e. munchies) when using cannabis, and eat an increased amount of calories. However when not actively using cannabis, I believe caloric intake may be significantly lower due to another well known effect of heavy cannabis use - lack of motivation. Basically, I think heavy stoners don't eat much because they can't be bothered; they then get lifted, eat a bunch of junk, then repeat. The end result is a fairly low calorie intake (hence low bodyweight), but poor food choices and nutrient timing (hence undesirable body composition). A sweeping generalisation possibly, but I don't think it's too far off the mark in a large number of cases.

"Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man"

So, just as I was going to publish this article, a friend brought another study to my attention. I'm not going to delete my little hypothesis above, because it is potentially still a factor in why smoking kush tends to correlate with low BMI (which, despite some studies which showed no correlation, was found in other studies such as this and this). However, the aforementioned study found that cannabis users on average have a smaller waist circumference than non-users and importantly lower fasting insulin levels. This is indicative of greater insulin sensitivity which is a good thing as far as achieving a favourable body composition and not getting diabetes is concerned. You may remember that tobacco smoking caused insulin resistance, the negative opposite of what cannabis has been shown to do here; so if your smoking dutchies as opposed to US style pure joints, consider this one pretty much an even. If you are a bong user or a pure joint smoker, chalk this one up as a win.

Going back to the lack of motivation that stems from heavy recreational weed use; clearly this is not going to be a benefit for any individual wanting to gain muscle or lose fat, both of which are aims which are going to require some focussed effort on art of the subject. If you're lighting up most nights, it is highly unlikely that you are going to have the drive to wake up and put in a hard gym session and keep your nutrition on point. You'll probably just sit around pretending you like Reggae because you have a Bob Marley poster and one of those hats with the dreads.

Another factor potentially leading to poor body composition for male cannabis users is the oestrogenic effect it exerts. Again I'll take the wording directly from the study:
"our research clearly confirmed that smoking marijuana has an ER-mediated estrogenic effect on the endocrine system, and that this effect is mostly caused not by the cannabinoid compounds themselves but by the complex ingredients generated by smoking marijuana."
As I'm fairy sure the vast majority of stoners are going to be smoking up, not drinking weed tea or baking space cakes on the daily, you can pretty much consider weed oestrogenic. This is bad news for male cannabis users as high oestrogen levels will cause lower T (and therefore decrease all the good things that come from maximising testosterone levels) fatigue, loss of muscle tone, increased body fat (especially in the chest area), loss of libido and sexual function and an enlarged prostate. Well, that sucks.

The effects of cannabis on sexual function and drive are pretty interesting; during my research for this article I found a whole load of anecdotal evidence of an increase in the female sex drive when smoking green and aside from a few hilarious accounts of dudes enjoying a quick one off the hand and passing out after a smoke, far less reports of weed increasing male libido. And guess what, science agrees:

"more beneficial than debilitating effects of cannabinoids on female sexual proceptivity and receptivity while suggesting predominantly detrimental effects on male sexual motivation and erectile functioning. Data from human and non-human species converge on the ephemeral nature of THC-induced testosterone decline. However, it is clear that cannabinoid-induced inhibition of male sexual behaviour is independent of concurrent declines in testosterone levels."
So weed makes girls horny as hell and guys boring as hell...where the stoner girls at?

Science tells me this is good.

So in summation, weed may be partially responsible for a lot of great music (I listen to ridiculous amount of stoner rap) and art, but it's also responsible for increased oestrogen levels, weight gain through increased appetite and a nosedive in male sex drive and functioning. Fuck that ...oh wait.

Stimulants

Dirty raves, naughty beats, crunchy bass lines, fucking stupid expressions and MDMA. For some these are all the ingredients necessary for a good night. The amphetamine family encompasses a wide array of compounds, but the commonly used ones tend to do a similar thing once inside your body. The ones that any non-insane person would be using (that means not meth... please don't use meth) act as psychostimulants, they increase wakefulness and alertness, release dopamine and norepinephrine which leads to feelings of euphoria, decreased fatigue, elevation of mood and increased libido. They also tend to decrease appetite and increase energy expenditure through movement, so from a fat loss point of view, stimulants of the amphetamine family get a gold star. This shouldn't really come as too much of a surprise; ephedrine (usually combined with caffeine and aspirin) was the bodybuilder's drug of choice for fat loss cycles before it was made illegal. This is simply because it works, ephedrine has stronger fat loss effects than other stimulants, but the premise is the same; they act to both raise basal metabolic rate through increased thermogenesis (the production of body heat) and increases fat breakdown through beta-andrenergic receptor agonism.

They are a very happy family.

The negatives of stimulants has to do with the effects of withdrawal, which can be experienced from a single dose. The classic case is 'Blue Tuesday' which is the day of depression and lethargy after a weekend stimulant binge. Obviously it doesn't have to be a Tuesday, but following a high from stimulant use, there will always be a low due to depleted serotonin levels in the brain. For any individual looking to improve body composition, this day of feeling like a sack of shit is likely not going to be conducive to a productive training sessions or good diet practice. There are also reports (again) of erectile dysfunction stemming from amphetamine use (told you drugs were bad news for men), which must be especially frustrating when paired with increased libido; super horny with a limp dick. Fuck that... oh wait.

Pulling absolutely retarded faces is also a legitimate downside.

A bit of personal opinion for any fans of stimulants: coming from a trained chemist who has had a read through of a fair few MDMA syntheses, I see quite a few opportunities for various chemical nasties to be left in the mix by any cooks that are cutting corners (which they likely are). When you buy shit on the street, you don't know what the hell is in it, which if you value your health should probably have you thinking twice. However, ephedrine, which we mentioned earlier, is still legal in some countries and therefore can be purchased as pharmaceutical quality (generally 99.8%) tablets. I'm not condoning the use of illegal stimulants, however if you are that way inclined, I'd recommend you consider the use of pharma-quality ephedrine over street powders, future you will thank young you.


Cocaine

Nose candy is a very interesting molecule with a completely unique mechanism of action in the body; the main effect of cocaine is the binding to and blocking of the dopamine transporter protein, causing a build up of dopamine in the brain which leads to the feelings of alertness, well-being and euphoria. Cocaine is well known as a pretty severe appetite reducing agent (back in the old days when health and safety didn't exist it was marketed as such) the problem is, unlike amphetamine stimulants which up-regulate fat loss, cocaine only down-regulates appetite. This means that weight will be lost, but a large portion of this will be from muscle mass, due to insufficient protein and calorie intake and furthermore, malnutrition due to large vitamin and mineral deficiencies become a genuine problem. Thus people with cocaine habits tend to become skinny, sunken shells of humans...not a good look. Cocaine can also cause all manners of respiratory problems, not desirable for anyone who wants to be training and getting in good physical condition.

Cocaine bear knows that it's a slippery slope.

Once again, the guys get a shitty deal when it comes to cocaine abuse as erectile dysfunction once again is an issue. Like amphetamines, cocaine serves to heighten libido in many, but can also serve to make sure you never capitalise on that pleasure. So for the last time, say it with me; fuck that ...oh wait.