Lyle Alzado

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Lyle Alzado is a prime example of what performance enhancing drugs can do to the human body. Lyle Alzado was one of the first major sports icons who admitted to using performance enhancing drugs. Alzado was a professional athlete in the National Football League for a combined fifteen seasons for the Denver Broncos, Cleveland Browns, and Oakland Raiders. While playing professional football, he was an intimidating force due to his size and the aggression that steroids had caused to go haywire. He faithfully relied on steroids to help his body for twenty years. Unfortunately, after his prolonged steroid use, his body began to break down and Lyle was diagnosed with brain cancer at the age of forty two. Before Alzado died, he wanted to show all…show more content…
The two most common performance enhancing drugs are steroids and HGH, or otherwise known as human growth hormones. The first anabolic steroid was created by Dr. John Ziegler in 1956 and was called Dianabol (Roberts, 1). Dianabol is the first anabolic steroid ever produced that wasn’t just strictly testosterone. Steroids were originally made by Ziegler to enhance performance, reduce and repair injuries, and lengthen careers. At the time, many people saw this as a new innovation to help make themselves fit and put them in the best possible shape. The problems eventually became known when many people started to complain about performance enhancing drugs. In, 1968 there was an official complaint about steroids made by the World Health Organization (Roberts 1). Shortly after this complaint many professional sporting leagues made their bans on performance enhancing drugs. The original ban on anabolic steroids was enacted due to moral and ethical concerns, not the player’s health or safety. Even though the ban was put into place, some athletes refused to listen. The first athlete caught breaking the ban was an American swimmer named Rick De Mont. He was caught using a newly banned substance in the year of 1972, is known as ephedrine. There are many negative effects to using steroids. Some of the effects include high cholesterol levels, severe acne, thinning of hair, high blood pressure, and liver…show more content…
HGH is a naturally-produced hormone in a healthy human body. It is not this kind of HGH that is used to enhance, but it is the HGH made from advent genetic engineering that is created during a very complex process (Mathias 1). The breakthrough of HGH helped athletes to take an illegal substance without getting caught because HGH wasn’t able to be traced in a drug tests. Although HGH is not as popular as steroids, it still was a pretty big impact in the young sports world. The main difference between HGH and steroids is that steroids have many life threatening or serious side effects, but HGH on the other hand does not. It is also proven that anabolic steroids increase an athlete’s performance while there are still doubts whether or not HGH affects the body to the extent that anabolic steroids
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