Where we love to rant about how bad contraceptives are for you, and also about how important it is to stay healthy and fit.
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Young women seeking a sculpted, muscular silhouette may want to avoid taking oral contraceptives, U.S. researchers said on Friday.
They found women who were not taking birth control pills gained 60 percent more muscle mass after a 10-week weight training program than those who were.
The study, led by Chang-Woock Lee and Steven Riechman of Texas A&M University in College Station and Mark Newman of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, will be presented at the American Physiological Society meeting in New Orleans this weekend.
The researchers studied 73 generally healthy women between 18 and 31 who completed a whole-body resistance exercise training program. About half took the pill and half did not.
...
Both groups exercised three times a week under the supervision of exercise physiologists, performing the same number and intensity of exercises.
At the end of the 10 weeks, the women who were not taking oral contraceptives had built significantly more lean muscle.
And blood samples before and after the training period showed the women on the pill had lower levels of muscle-building hormones such as testosterone and far higher levels of muscle-breaking hormones such as cortisol.
Remind me again why this s#$t is so popular?
As a Protestant, I'm not against all forms of birth control, period, end of statement. But the more I read about oral contraceptives, and the more I listen to various women's (including my own) experiences with them, the more disturbed I am. I think that they're medically very dubious and littered with side effects that the medical community largely pooh-poohs. I've been working on starting to get in shape the last year or so, and this post gives me one more reason to be glad that I've been off the blasted things for a while now.
Posted by: sara | 20 April 2009 at 01:15 PM