The Road To Controversy | Turkesterone Scandal Pt. 1

While beta-ecdysterone seemed like the clear winner from our perspective, there was a lot of chatter about turkesterone at the time. Whenever appropriate, we like leaning into trends, especially the bodybuilding trends as they bring A LOT of demand with them. A demand which seems almost impossible to fully satisfy, so it makes a lot of business sense to provide a high quality Nootropics Depot version, in order to meet the demand that’s already out there. Supply and demand can be a beautiful thing! However, we quickly started to realize that what we were looking at wasn’t very beautiful at all, in fact, it was quite ugly! We started asking our trusted suppliers if they could get us turkesterone, and most of them told us that they could not. Our primary suppliers had not figured out yet how to cultivate the Ajuga turkestanica plant in which turkesterone is found, and the supply of the botanical is extremely limited as you can basically only find it growing wild in Uzbekistan. We shopped around a bit, and found some suppliers that were selling turkesterone standardized products, so we acquired some samples for them to test in our lab, and surprise surprise, they all failed. We went back and forth with a bunch of suppliers, and most of them told us that they are indeed selling turkesterone products to Western companies, but none of them are actually real. Well, this is when we started to get very suspicious, because there were already a plethora of products on the market that claimed to contain turkesterone.

This was all quite unexpected, and totally not what we had planned to do. To be honest, we were very much out of our element at this point because we didn’t even have our own video presence on youtube yet, just some audio-only podcasts. It wasn’t long before Paul received a call from one of the biggest personalities involved in the scandal, Derek from ‘More Plates More Dates’ fame. What we heard actually surprised us quite a bit, it seemed that Derek himself had gotten duped. He had bought from what he thought was a good supplier, and had unfortunately used a lab that we have identified as a “dry lab”. This is an element that we ourselves have struggled with in the past too. If you put too much trust into your suppliers, you will get burned. Luckily, we always caught the bad batches before they ever went into production, but that clearly is not always the case in the rest of the supplement industry. We then got more unpleasant messages through youtube videos, emails etc that we were going to get sued by the companies that we called out. Spoiler alert, ZERO lawsuits occurred, because we were in the right.

At this point we realized that we can call out the bad actors all we want, but we need to be able to help them improve if they want to. Derek seemed to want to change, he had been on quite a few calls with Paul, and Paul even invited him out to our lab. All of a sudden, everything changed though, and Derek turned on us and everyone else in the industry, including his long time friend (and competitor), Greg Doucette. The videos took a more defensive nature, and he even ended up bringing some mysterious ex-FDA person onto one of his videos. This is when we learned once again, that many of these companies are too addicted to the easy profits they can make. It seems that people are willing to change at first, but once they look into how complex it is to actually do things the right way, they start to backpedal. At the end of the day, why would you invest immense amounts of time and money into a product that is already selling exceptionally well? If you have the superpower to leave your morals at the door, it makes perfect sense to just keep pumping up your marketing campaigns in order to keep selling the same garbage products. At this point, our initial hope of helping the industry to change started to quickly fade, until. . .

Turkesterone Scandal Exposed

In June of 2022, we woke up one day, and with utter disbelief we discovered that we’d gotten wrapped up in a somewhat viral scandal. We had to pinch ourselves to make sure that we weren’t dreaming, but it was real. Multiple big fitness youtubers were making videos, and some were even calling us up! Over time, this event seems to have been called the ‘turkesterone scandal’. Now over two years later, we decided to revisit this scandal, to see if anything has changed in the past two years.

For those who are not aware of the events that led up to the ‘turkesterone scandal’, here is some much needed backstory! In 2022, we started looking into ecdysteroids. We had written them off for a long time thinking it was just a bodybuilding hype, however, more and more research started coming out showing that the ecdysteroids could actually be highly efficacious. This obviously piqued our interest, so we started looking into the research to see which ecdysteroid we wanted to focus on. The one that stood out the most to us, was 20-hydroxyecdysone, better known as beta-ecdysterone. There were two reasons why beta-ecdysterone stood out, the primary reason being that it has a solid amount of research on it, including multiple human clinical trials. Secondarily, a well established supply chain already existed for beta-ecdysterone, giving us easy access to a very high quality raw ingredient.

While beta-ecdysterone seemed like the clear winner from our perspective, there was a lot of chatter about turkesterone at the time. Whenever appropriate, we like leaning into trends, especially the bodybuilding trends as they bring A LOT of demand with them. A demand which seems almost impossible to fully satisfy, so it makes a lot of business sense to provide a high quality Nootropics Depot version, in order to meet the demand that’s already out there. Supply and demand can be a beautiful thing! However, we quickly started to realize that what we were looking at wasn’t very beautiful at all, in fact, it was quite ugly! We started asking our trusted suppliers if they could get us turkesterone, and most of them told us that they could not. Our primary suppliers had not figured out yet how to cultivate the Ajuga turkestanica plant in which turkesterone is found, and the supply of the botanical is extremely limited as you can basically only find it growing wild in Uzbekistan. We shopped around a bit, and found some suppliers that were selling turkesterone standardized products, so we acquired some samples for them to test in our lab, and surprise surprise, they all failed. We went back and forth with a bunch of suppliers, and most of them told us that they are indeed selling turkesterone products to Western companies, but none of them are actually real. Well, this is when we started to get very suspicious, because there were already a plethora of products on the market that claimed to contain turkesterone.

We realised that what we had uncovered here was a supplement scam that was potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of fitness enthusiasts, and perhaps even the companies themselves were getting scammed by the oftentimes brilliant scamming techniques employed by many of our overseas suppliers. So, for the first time ever, we lightly blew the whistle on our own subreddit, R/nootropicsdepot. Here, Paul, the owner of Nootropics Depot & Natrium Health posted the analytical results with the companies names on it. This information quickly spread, and before we really had time to realize what was happening, youtube was full of reaction videos from VERY prominent bodybuilders, some of which had millions of subscribers.

This was all quite unexpected, and totally not what we had planned to do. To be honest, we were very much out of our element at this point because we didn’t even have our own video presence on youtube yet, just some audio-only podcasts. It wasn’t long before Paul received a call from one of the biggest personalities involved in the scandal, Derek from ‘More Plates More Dates’ fame. What we heard actually surprised us quite a bit, it seemed that Derek himself had gotten duped. He had bought from what he thought was a good supplier, and had unfortunately used a lab that we have identified as a “dry lab”. This is an element that we ourselves have struggled with in the past too. If you put too much trust into your suppliers, you will get burned. Luckily, we always caught the bad batches before they ever went into production, but that clearly is not always the case in the rest of the supplement industry. We then got more unpleasant messages through youtube videos, emails etc that we were going to get sued by the companies that we called out. Spoiler alert, ZERO lawsuits occurred, because we were in the right.

At this point we realized that we can call out the bad actors all we want, but we need to be able to help them improve if they want to. Derek seemed to want to change, he had been on quite a few calls with Paul, and Paul even invited him out to our lab. All of a sudden, everything changed though, and Derek turned on us and everyone else in the industry, including his long time friend (and competitor), Greg Doucette. The videos took a more defensive nature, and he even ended up bringing some mysterious ex-FDA person onto one of his videos. This is when we learned once again, that many of these companies are too addicted to the easy profits they can make. It seems that people are willing to change at first, but once they look into how complex it is to actually do things the right way, they start to backpedal. At the end of the day, why would you invest immense amounts of time and money into a product that is already selling exceptionally well? If you have the superpower to leave your morals at the door, it makes perfect sense to just keep pumping up your marketing campaigns in order to keep selling the same garbage products. At this point, our initial hope of helping the industry to change started to quickly fade, until. . .