TC: I know you’ve been using licorice cream to elevate Testosterone levels. Most of the sports science guys say that licorice is bad news, a strong estrogen agonist, so how did you come up with the idea of using it to elevate T levels?
Charles Poliquin: Most of the studies on licorice being an estrogen agonist were done on women. What was shown was that the licorice cream aggravated PMS symptoms in women already showing estrogen dominance.
TC: Well that’s a hell of a good model for athletes!
Charles Poliquin: Yes! It’s like saying boron increases Testosterone, yes, in women going through menopause who are also magnesium deficient. So, here’s the rationale: the reason some people are Testosterone deficient has to do with acetyl coenzyme A, which changes into pregnenolone, and pregnenolone is the mother of hormones. Pregnenolone has two choices in life: it can become cortisol or DHEA.
When a guy has a ****ty diet, a poor lifestyle, useless training programs, he forms a preferential pathway so his pregnenolone turns into cortisol and what happens is that there’s less raw material to turn into DHEA. If you don’t have enough DHEA, you’re basically castrating yourself.
The function of licorice root is to do two things; one is to prolong the half-life or cortisol. Now there are actually 7 mathematical permutations of what can happen to the Testosterone/cortisol ratio, depending on time of day, so what you have to do is give licorice cream when the guy’s cortisol is low.
By the way, only one patient out every 250 comes up well in circadian Testosterone/cortisol tests.
Now, if an athlete’s been under stress for too long a time, you actually get to the point where he does not make cortisol or DHEA, and that’s when you start running on adrenaline. The worst scores most always come from people living in the Northeast part of the USA. A symptom of that is you start waking up in the middle of the night because cortisol, if you remember, is low-grade adrenaline.
So, if a guy tests with low Testosterone and low cortisol in the morning and also low DHEA, we give him licorice extract. It prolongs the half-life of the cortisol and it fools the body into thinking, "Okay, now when I next have the opportunity to make cortisol or DHEA, I’m going to go the way of DHEA because my cortisol is elevated. Then, of course, DHEA is preferentially converted to Testosterone.
Licorice root also has the advantage of lowering LDL and triglycerides; including helping convert T4 to T3. You can also put it on the abs and your fat levels will go down.
But you can’t give it to everybody every time; you can only use it to increase T in guys who have low cortisol and low DHEA.
By the way, another way to fool the body is to give it a stable form of Vitamin B5 in very large quantities, and since the B5 is the precursor to acetyl Coenzyme A, it leads to more pregnenolone, which ultimately leads to higher Testosterone.
