Testosterone - All about Testosterone | Brad Pilon's 'Eat Blog Eat'

Interesting article on testosterone by Brad Pilon author of  "Eat Stop Eat"

All about Testosterone

by Brad Pilon on September 25, 2012

Admittedly this blog post has very little to do with Intermittent Fasting, but I’ll do my best to tie it all together in the end.
Instead of fasting, today we’re talking about Testosterone. And, although the name testosterone is only 65 years old, the hormone that it identifies has been a focus of scientific interest for more than a century.
I would argue that its influence on masculinity has made Testosterone the most controversial hormone in the human body, and that this controversy has left the average person blind to its potentially therapeutic properties and benefits.
However, despite the common belief, there is a lot more to Testosterone than baseball and bodybuilders.
For the purpose of keeping this post under 10,000 words we’re going to be mostly exploring testosterone in men, but I will point out some of the facts that apply to women as well.
All right, lets get started.
The basics of Testosterone are fairly easy – Men have much more than women and this difference in circulating testosterone levels is largely responsible for the main differences between the sexes (muscle mass, body fat storage patterns, body hair etc).
Testosterone secretion in men follows a circadian rhythm^[i]. This is just a fancy way of saying that the amount of Testosterone in your blood varies depending on the time of day. Peak serum testosterone levels in men occur between 5:30 AM and 8:00 AM and then slowly taper off towards the end of the day then start to rise again during the night ^[ii],[iii].
It is also well known that Testosterone plays an important role in the development of skeletal muscle size ^[iv]. There is a well established dose response between average serum testosterone and muscle mass. This includes levels in the extremely low range all the way into ‘supraphysiologic range’ – the levels only possible with testosterone injections, or really rare disease states..... Con't.

Testosterone - All about Testosterone | Brad Pilon's 'Eat Blog Eat'