Word: boosting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Testosterone, after all, can boost muscle mass and sexual drive. (It can also cause liver damage and accelerate prostate cancer, but more on that later.) That makes it central to two of this culture's rising preoccupations: perfecting the male body and sustaining the male libido, even when the rest of the male has gone into retirement. So will testosterone become the next estrogen, a hormone that causes men to bang down their doctor's doors, demanding to be turned into Mr. T? Do not underestimate the appeal of any substance promising to restore the voluptuous powers of youth...
Outside the bedroom and the gym, just what does testosterone do for you? Studies in animals have repeatedly shown that testosterone and aggression go hand in hand. Castrate species after species, and you get a pussycat. Boost the testosterone with injections and the castrated animal acts more like a tiger. In one study of men, when the testosterone levels were suppressed (in this case by researchers using medications) libido and dominant behaviors dropped. But when a mere 20% of the testosterone was added back, libido and domination climbed to the levels where they had started. Which suggests that...
...this exercise, you don't even have to picture the Packers vs. the Vikings. The T boost also happens during nonphysical competitions, like chess games and trivia contests. Whatever the game, in evolutionary terms this makes sense. Among the primates from whom we are descended, the victorious male in any encounter may have needed to maintain high testosterone levels in the expectation that his position in the pecking order would be challenged by the next guy coming...
...matters--sex drive. Married men tend to have lower testosterone. It's evolution's way of encouraging the wandering mate to stay home. (In newly divorced men, T levels rise again, as the men prepare to re-enter the competition for a mate.) If aging men start to routinely boost their testosterone levels, and their sexual appetite, to earlier levels, will they further upset the foundations of that ever endangered social arrangement called the family? "What happens when men have higher levels than normal?" asks James M. Dabbs, a psychology professor at Georgia State University. "They are just unmanageable...
...media has blown out of proportion every single jump, dive, boost, explosion in the stock market," he says. "It's the number one story, not Elian, not the Philippines, not Clinton. A small drop becomes next day's tank because of the media...