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Deer antlers and doping?


With performance-enhancing drugs back in the headlines—thanks, Lance Armstrong—we thought we’d pass on the latest trend in PEDs.

Deer antlers.

No kidding. According to the the Yahoo! blog, The Post Game, Ray Lewis is among a group of NFL players who allegedly have used a product called The Ultimate Spray from a supplement company, Sports With Alternatives to Steroids.

The spray contains extract of deer antler velvet (the soft fuzz on the antler), “farmed” in New Zealand, and sells for $68 a bottle.

This isn’t the first time guys have consumed deer antler. It has a two-millennium history in China and other Eastern cultures as a sleep and sexual performance aid.

The secret to the antler’s recuperative and muscle-building powers is a substance, IGF-1, which is similar to human growth hormone in promoting recovery and improving athletic performance. IGF-1 is banned by the NFL (and the Olympics, too), whether you take it in a pure form or mixed up with whatever else makes up deer antlers.

That said, it’s not easy to detect IGF-1 from a bottle, because it’s similar to the IGF-1 an athlete produces naturally.

“You can find it,” Jonathan Danaceau, lab director at the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Lab, based in Salt Lake City, told The Post Game. “But saying whether this is synthetic or natural is hard to determine. It’s only detectable in blood, and most anti-doping tests are done in urine.”

We’ll have to see how this all shakes out, especially with the NFL and its players preparing for a bruising negotiation of their collective bargaining agreement this offseason that might make movement on performance-enhancing drugs difficult or impossible. But if you see three deer wandering through one of those post-game locker room shots on Fox next season, you’ll know why.

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