Young men seek muscle in the ‘Wild West’ of alternative PEDs

By CNN Newsource

Published May 28, 2026 8:00 AM

By T.M. Brown, CNN

(CNN) — When Jason was 17 and “trying to get swole,” he said he and a friend started noticing they were getting served Instagram videos from gym influencers promoting a drug called MK-677. Intrigued by the promise that the drug would make them hungrier, so that they could eat more for muscle building without getting full, the teens “started sending the videos back and forth to one another,” said Jason, who is using a pseudonym to protect his privacy.

After seeking out more information on YouTube and Reddit, they eventually ordered capsules billed as MK-677 directly from a Chinese manufacturer. Jason, who is now 19, said the pills seemed to make him “insanely” hungry, as advertised, and his sleep improved. But the apparent side effects scared him off. “Both of us were constantly bloated,” he said, “and I ended up having high blood pressure.”

Young men in America, bombarded with images, advertisements and peer pressure telling them they need to enlarge themselves, have an unprecedented and largely untested assortment of substances waiting to drop-ship straight into their bodies. Those pursuing more muscle can draw on a wide-ranging and ever-growing gray market for performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), beyond the better-established and more widely known anabolic steroids.

In addition to MK-677 — also known as ibutamoren — there’s turkesterone, a plant-based alternative to synthetic steroids, and ostarine, a selective androgen receptor modulator (SARM), promoted for its ability to build muscle in targeted parts of the body. These compounds are often positioned and sold as “nutritional supplements,” and can be bought with a few clicks from unregulated online sources. Users on social media platforms are swapping WhatsApp numbers for the best providers, and influencers across the internet are encouraging young men to inject or ingest these products in the pursuit of a “better” body.

The enthusiasm has outpaced medical knowledge, or even awareness, of how people are choosing to use these substances and what the effects may be. In 2024, Rohlil Dhaliwal, then an undergraduate powerlifter at Harvard University, said he was talking to his friends on the team about turkesterone. Influencers on social media cited studies to say it would stimulate muscle growth like an anabolic steroid, but without the usual nasty impacts on the liver, heart or hormonal regulation.

Dhaliwal, who was also an undergraduate researcher at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, at the time, reached out for more information to Dr. Harrison Pope, the director of the biological psychiatry lab at McLean and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Pope is one of the world’s foremost authorities on anabolic steroids and has been researching PEDs and their impacts on people’s bodies and minds for decades.

“I’m one of the most widely published people in this field in the world,” Pope said. “I had never heard of turkesterone. And if I hadn’t heard of it, then it was likely a lot of people in the wider medical community hadn’t heard of it either.”

Pope was concerned that the gap between self-directed use of drugs like turkesterone and the limited knowledge about these drugs among medical professionals was creating a public health hazard. “We in the ‘above ground’ medical community are just completely out of touch with this vast underground world,” he said.

He also pointed to the lack of longitudinal studies for any of these drugs as a potential risk. “It is unclear whether they are safer for the long term, or whether they may have unforeseen dangers,” he said. It was only recently, he added, that the medical community developed literature on the impacts of recreational use of more established steroid PEDs, because many users are only now reaching old age.

For a research paper published in March in the journal Performance Enhancement & Health — titled “The wild west of bodybuilding supplements” — Pope and Dhaliwal surveyed nearly 400 sports medicine professionals to gauge their awareness of MK-677, ostarine and turkesterone.

What they found is that the recreational use of the PEDs had left experts far behind. “We put a couple of fictitious compounds on the list in the survey, and more experts claimed to know about those drugs than the real compounds we were interested in,” Pope said.

Dubious supplement fads have been around since before science ever identified testosterone, and users on web forums like T Nation and Bodybuilding.com have facilitated peer-to-peer advice about steroid dosages for better or worse since the late 1990s.

“The forums historically served as an open platform where users discussed a wide range of topics, viewpoints and personal experiences,” Bodybuilding.com CEO Andres Giraldo said in a statement. “That history remains part of the internet era in which online fitness communities were built, but it does not reflect the direction of the company today.”

T-Nation’s founder and CEO, Tim Patterson, said in a statement that his company’s forum “addresses the reality that adults are using performance-enhancing compounds” and that “many are looking for serious, experience-based discussion instead of fear, stigma, outdated medical advice, or outright dismissal.”

Forum members have “extensive real-world knowledge,” Patterson said. “But no one in an open online forum should be treated as a medical authority.”

Over the last five years, against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Civic Health and Institutions Project found that overall faith in the expertise of doctors and hospitals went from roughly 71% in April of 2020 to about 40% in 2025, while trust in researchers and scientists went from 58% to 35% over the same time.

In a 2004 study, Pope also found that amateur bodybuilders — a growing population in America — were also specifically less likely than the general population to trust doctors’ opinions of supplements. Now, influencers, podcasters and the MAHA movement have stepped in to fill that space, many of them selling drugs like peptides and SARMs that have little scientific backing and an unknown risk profile, especially in the long term.

Last month, it was reported that the FDA would consider loosening restrictions on peptides, which are favored by many wellness influencers and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., even though there is uneven medical evidence for their benefits and very few have gone through human clinical trials.

Steroid-adjacent compounds like turkesterone and ostarine are less widely discussed by wellness influencers, though, which had led to the creation of an “underground” community of users who swap tips with minimal medical oversight.

Other drugs like MK-677 and ostarine have also seen an uptick in interest due to social media influencers who make promises about quick muscle gains with minimal risks compared to anabolic steroids like trenbolone and nandrolone.

“The chatter among college-aged kids was always about how they just heard about these drugs from some fitness influencers on social media and got caught up in the hype,” Dhaliwal said.

“There are guardrails for medical professionals in how they speak about drugs. None of those exist for health influencers,” said Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum, the founder of Barbell Medicine in San Diego. Barbell has a popular YouTube channel where Feigenbaum and his colleagues break down the science of different popular supplements including compounds like MK-677. They often throw cold water on the hype of different drugs.

“We’re powerlifters, so that gives us some street cred with our audience,” Feigenbaum said. “But we’re really just trying to be an honest broker of information.”

For people who want a muscle-building boost, lesser-known drugs offer the possibility, however unproven, of avoiding known side effects. Steroid abuse can lead to severe cardiovascular issues as well as liver and kidney damage. The autopsy of Rich Piana, a bodybuilder and steroid user who died in 2017 at the age of 46, found “significant” heart disease, and that both his heart and liver were twice the weight of normal humans’ organs.

There are varying levels of research into gray-market alternatives. In one clinical trial, ostarine — also known as enobosarm — was found to be effective at increasing lean muscle mass and is currently undergoing another round of clinical trials in breast cancer patients. There are some indications that it may be harmful to liver function. Several studies found that turkesterone had no appreciable impact on muscle growth, while MK-677 was pulled from clinical trials due to an increased risk of heart failure and diabetes.

All these drugs are also banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). A New York Times investigation found that many Olympic athletes have tested positive for ostarine over the last 20 years.

Feigenbaum said that people using these drugs in spite of their limited efficacy and unknown risks are made up of two populations. First, there are weightlifters who are interested in PEDs but are either scared off by anabolic steroids’ side effects or don’t want to risk buying them illegally. Drugs like MK-677 and ostarine can be purchased easily and promise similar results to controlled substances oxandrolone and trenbolone.

There are also people who distrust pharmaceutical companies and the larger medical community and want to “do their own research,” Feigenbaum said. “You’re sticking it to the man, you got to go see a doctor, and they don’t know anything about this stuff and you feel like you’re on the bleeding edge,” he said. There’s an irony at play, though. Feigenbaum said that despite many users thinking they’re in some sort of counterculture that eschews the medical establishment, “all of these peptide drugs were discovered and manufactured by Big Pharma in the hopes of patenting them.”

The drugs are easy to get, too, especially compared to anabolic steroids, which are highly regulated as controlled substances. An internet search for MK-677 or ostarine yields dozens of vendors that sell what they say are “99% pure” versions of the compounds for low prices that are shipped directly to shoppers’ doors. Influencers also sell them directly, advertising their WhatsApp or Telegram numbers so that people can get in.

“You can just buy them online and they’ll arrive at your house even if you don’t know what you’re getting chemically,” Dhaliwal said. Beyond surveying medical experts for their study, Pope and Dhaliwal purchased turkesterone supplements from several different suppliers and found that their quality varied wildly. Some contained trace amounts of the compound but were mostly filler. Other samples contained no turkesterone at all. (A cottage industry of third-party testers has emerged for buyers who want to test their goods for purity.)

These risks have not stopped people from buying and using these drugs. SARMs, peptides and other compounds are becoming increasingly mainstream and marketed toward young consumers. One study in the UK found that 29% of young adults between 16 and 25 saw an ad for SARMs on social media every week.

Daryl, who’s in his early 20s, said he started taking turkesterone at age 17. He ordered it off Amazon after hearing about it from social media influencers, but, disappointed by the lack of muscle growth, stopped using it. He started taking MK-677 and ostarine a couple of years later and said he found that they helped him pack on bulk and gave him a “mental boost,.” though he said the MK-677 made him look like a “fat chipmunk” due to water retention. (He stopped using MK-677 in favor of the SARM ligandrol.)

But the yields weren’t enough, so he started using RAD-140, a more potent SARM that had some side effects he didn’t experience on ostarine. “It was more harsh mentally because it was more so aggression over pure dopamine,” said Daryl, who is using a pseudonym to protect his privacy. “But the yields on RAD were amazing.”

Daryl eventually moved on to using pure testosterone, specifically because its impacts are better researched and understood. He said the hormone injections have helped reduce his anxiety while in school, but that so much of the demand among young men for these drugs is driven by insecurity.

Daryl said that his own use was driven by body dysmorphic disorder, and that “aggressive marketing” encourages experimentation.

“There’s this aesthetic pressure with looksmaxxing and the manosphere and influencer marketing where perceived physical standards push young guys towards experimentation because they’re scared their parents or doctors will tell them they don’t need it,” he said. “Younger men need to understand how much their perspective is being distorted by the internet.”

There’s no sign that the marketing effort is losing steam. Over Memorial Day weekend, a competition called the Enhanced Games drew thousands of attendees to Las Vegas. Participating athletes, many of whom are former professionals or Olympians, are allowed to use substances banned by WADA but approved by the FDA including anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, and stimulants. People have taken to calling it “the Steroid Olympics.”

In a statement released shortly after the games were announced, the International Olympic Committee said that “Promoting performance-enhancing substances and methods sends a dangerous message—especially to current and future generations of athletes.”

Whether anyone in the next generation cares about that message is still an open question. Jason, the teenage weightlifter, hasn’t totally ruled out taking anabolic steroids in the future, though he said he wants to wait until he’s slightly older to start a cycle. He knows, he said, about a couple of websites where he can order them as easily as ostarine or MK-677. “It’s really easy for anyone to get this stuff now,” he said.

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