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Comment by talldatethrow | Hacker News Reader

Something like 4% of males admit to steroid use at some point. If you consider that non gym goers probably aren't using steroids (let's hope), that means a significant portion of fit males are. Heck, it doesn't take long at the gym to see women that are dabbling if you're in a major metro area. And from reading their posts online in forums id say most know there are severe long term problems. They try to ignore the people dying in their 20s and 30s as people that just took way too much.

People seem to be perfectly happy to trade future years of their life for present benefits.

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> Something like 4% of males admit to steroid use at some point. If you consider that non gym goers probably aren't using steroids (let's hope), that means a significant portion of fit males are.

"At some point" is not the same as long term or chronic use. From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6517163/ :

> There is a distinction between lifetime ever-use of AASs and chronic use. Lifetime prevalence use includes a high percentage of short-term (even a single episode of) experimental use in teenagers and young men.

> People seem to be perfectly happy to trade future years of their life for present benefits.

Most humans will trade almost anything for reproductive fitness. It's what they're selected for.

Here is a meta-analysis that puts lifetime prevalence at ~6% for males:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10472...

Significant? Are we talking 40 percent or 4 percent of gym goers?

My perception of most gym goers are ordinary folks who want to get healthy, not gymbros who want to build giant muscles. Of course, this is at a single gym so this is anecdotal.

4% of adult US males from a study I read.

So ignore the ones that don't workout at all. Now probably ignore the ones just going through the motions at the gym and clearly aren't trying to achieve real muscle growth.

It stands to reason that if you see someone fit and with decent muscles, they're part of the group that might have taken them.

If it's 4% of all males, makes me think it's close to 25% of males with good amounts of muscles. Of course it's skewed by basically 90% of people with massive amounts of muscles taking them. But massive muscles alone doesn't make up 4% of the population.

Reasonable guess, but hard to verify.

It appears for example that every youtuber who looks like they have decent amount of muscles are going to be hit with the accusation that they used steroids.

90% of statistics are garbage. More seriously, there is a massive replication crisis and these types of studies are at the center. Did they survey 20 people? Did they happen to be 20 year old fratbros on a college campus?

Even if you set survey methods aside, it has been well established that there are is a single digit percent of people that are simply survey obstructionists. They will say that the sky is red on a survey, because they dont care or are trolling

He said fit males. And he likely means, "visibly fit males".

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