The Supplements Made Me Do It

As a child, I couldn't get away with rule-breaking by saying, "The devil made me do it!" Yet this is essentially what some Major League Baseball players say when accused of steroid use: "The supplements made me do it."

Today star pitcher Roger Clemens is expected to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform about performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. The players and their representatives who have spoken so far -- to legislators and the press -- have offered a litany of excuses for how they ended up in the midst of a steroid scandal. The most preposterous, by far, is that dietary supplements are to blame.

Clemens, for example, has repeatedly denied using steroids or human growth hormone. But he acknowledged that he has been injected with vitamin B-12. Tainted B-12 was how Orioles first baseman Rafael Palmeiro explained his failed steroids test in 2005. In his congressional testimony last month, Baseball union chief Donald Fehr blamed not just dietary supplements, but Congress for insufficient regulation.

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Supplement Link to Prostate Cancer?

When two patients developed unusually aggressive metastatic prostate cancer within months of starting the same muscle-building dietary supplement, researchers here started investigating.

The supplement contained testosterone and estradiol but promoted cancer cell growth more potently than testosterone alone while hampering androgen blockade, found Shahrokh F. Shariat, M.D., of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center here, and colleagues, in the Jan. 15 issue of Clinical Cancer Research.

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