This still doesn't sell me on it being safe, but I thought this interview with Lyle McDonald might shed some light on it...
The Fat Loss King - An Interview With Lyle McDonald (Part I)View all articles by Maki Riddington
Wannabebig: I’m sure as time passes the amount of plublicity will grow as technology and medical research discovers unchartered territory. Lately, it seems that the use of Usnic Acid has been promoted as a potent fat burner. Is there any truth to this, and is it really a safe ‘supplement’ for bodybuilders to use?
Lyle M: Well, first and foremost, realize that ‘safe’ is a fairly nebulous term. Under the wrong set of circumstances, almost anything can be deadly. Aspirin has killed people to pick an easy example. That said, no I don’t think that usnic acid is necessarily any ‘safer’ than say, DNP (I’m comparing the two because they have identical modes of effect). In some ways, I think its more dangerous than DNP but that has more to do with how it’s being presented to people than the compound itself.
Say what you want about the man or DNP, but Dan Duchaine was always upfront with people: he said flat out, “Too much DNP WILL kill you.” Not might, not could, not may, not in a week, not years down the road. It WILL kill you soon after you overdose it. Now, fundamentally the problem is that most people (especially folks obsessed with weight loss) are idiots, and that includes me. They figure that if some is good, more is better. Bodybuilders and athletes are simply notorious for taking 2-3 times the recommended dose for the same ‘logical’ reasons: more must be better.
That’s why people ultimately get into trouble, they overdose a compound that would otherwise be quite safe. Now, with EC, an overdose can get you into trouble but you have to go out of your way to kill yourself (you can do it with severe overdosing, or overdosing it with a pre-existing problem or what have you but it’s fairly tough). With DNP, it’ll kill you and the margin between effective and lethal doses wasn’t huge. At least Dan made sure people were aware that higher doses were severely bad news and would put you in the grave. Hopefully that would keep all but the biggest idiot from taking more than necessary (and anyone dumb enough to overdose in the face of those types of warnings deserves to die, Darwinism at work for you). Even when I took it, I took his warnings about dose strictly to heed and didn’t even consider taking more than that.
Now we have usnic acid that works the same way as DNP and has the same metabolic effects (uncoupling ATP synthesis, generating heat and free radicals). But people are saying it’s safe or think that it’s ‘natural’ (so is cyanide, by the way). Couple that with the general public (and bodybuilding) attitide of more is better’ and you’ve got an accident just waiting to happen. A friend of mine here in town took it at the normal doses. Now, he’s a big guy, has used all kinds of drugs in his past. And the stuff was horrible for him, he couldn’t stand it. Now you take some obsessed female (or male) dieter, who thinks the stuff is perfectly safe, and they’re going to take triple the suggested dose. And they’re doing to keel over dead.
DNP was also nearly impossible to get. Unless you knew how to wrangle a chemical company to sell it to you, or knew someone who had some, the average person couldn’t have gotten their hands on DNP anyhow. Usnic acid is (well, was) readily available to anybody who wanted it: general weight loss fanatic, dumbass bodybuilder, whoever. You had to have at least a smidgen of brains to get DNP in the first place, hopefully those smarts would carry over to its use (and you wouldn’t do something incredibly stupid). Any moron could get usnic acid and they were being told it was safe.
Ok, enough ranting, I believe that both DNP and usnic acid can be used safely, at low doses by intelligent people. But look at the qualification: intelligent people. That excludes most of humanity, especially when it comes to weight loss and bodybuilders. Logic, reason and intelligence goes straight out the window when you’re dealing with those groups. They are reckless to the point of idiocy (look at the folks who got into trouble with Syntrax’s Triac, the thyroid derivative, by, like, taking multiple times the recommended dose).
So, used properly, it’s probably as safe as anything. In the real world, I don’t think the majority of folks will use it properly. And they’ll get into trouble.
Wannabebig: Thanks Lyle, I think our readers will now have a better understanding, in laymen terms, what the talk is all about with hormones and Usnic acid.
