This is a collaborative post: Have you experienced any changes in your lifestyle like weight gain, eating habits, exercise, sleep, or energy levels?
If you’re like others, you might have thought your hormones, particularly a deficiency in growth hormones, may have contributed to these changes.
Often, many people look for a quick fix to address these situations by taking HGH supplements. HGH is one of the essential hormones to keeping you in check later on in life.
Growth hormone is produced by your pituitary gland and it’s particularly beneficial for helping regulate your body composition and metabolism, muscle strength and bone growth, heart function and more.
What happens when you are deficient in growth hormone?
Growth hormone deficiency (GHD) is a condition where you have insufficient hormones produced by your pituitary gland from birth or as you get older. Typically, this can also happen if you experience a brain injury or head trauma, or it can be unknown.
The common symptoms of GHD are the following:
- Anxiety and depression
- Dry skin
- Low energy levels
- Difficulty concentrating
- Lack of sexual interest
How is GHD diagnosed?
Generally, GHD is diagnosed through a combination of tests such as testing your GH secretion and insulin tolerance testing. Often insulin tolerance tests might involve several blood samples to help doctors identify your deficiency. Unfortunately, there’s no specific test out there that exists just yet to highlight GHD outright.
Therefore, if you feel that you have any of these symptoms, you should consult your doctor. Upon consulting, they may advise you to undergo certain tests and recommend a treatment plan of HGH therapy through subcutaneous injections.
What’s the difference between the treatment options?
When looking online to treat GHD, you might be stuck on the two main treatment options available on the market.
HGH Supplements
Many people look into taking HGH Supplements as they’re readily available, quicker to take, and less time demanding getting diagnosed and undergoing Legal HGH therapy. Plus, manufacturers like Novex Biotech, CrazyBulk HGH-X2, Genf20 Plus, HyperGH 14, and more claim they can boost your growth hormone levels up to 682%.
Therefore given the accessibility, quicker time restraints, and bold statements, it can seem tempting to choose this option. However, beyond the surface level, there’s a lot of inaccurate reporting, mislabelling, and questionable ingredients of HGH supplements.
While many manufacturers claim their supplements can boost your levels, you should look into the various scientific reviews of GF-9 supplementation to get the right idea about its ingredients and how effective they are in boosting HGH levels.
In fact, there is only one study with a small sample of 16 people, and moreover, it was funded by a supplement manufacturer. Similarly, the participants were healthy individuals and fasting, which naturally favours spikes in HGH levels.
Ingredients of supplements
As these manufacturers make dietary supplements, there’s no guarantee they will be there as they’re not approved by the FDA or monitored in terms of their safety, quality, or anything else by third parties.
In addition to this, a lot of these manufacturers aren’t honest with the ingredients in the supplements. For instance, try looking at their labels, and it’s more than likely you won’t find an exact percentage of the active ingredients. Take Novex Biotech, for example; they only mention 2.9g of a proprietary blend.
As these blends don’t publicize the dose amounts, it’s more than likely these manufacturers will add fillers to the supplements like herbs and amino acids to deceive buyers and convince you of their formula’s effectiveness.
What else do the manufacturers claim?
All the marketing surrounding GF-9 claims that these supplements work by stimulating the natural synthesis process of HGH in your body. They also promise you’ll have the following benefits associated with prescription medication like HGH injections. Many manufacturers state that you’ll experience:
- Better sleep
- Improved mood
- Stronger bones
- Better sex drive
- More energy
- Increased lean muscle mass
However, there is not enough clinical data to support these benefits.
HGH Replacement Therapy
HGH therapy is a legal form of treatment that involves you administering injections before going to bed. It works as a synthetic form of HGH manufactured by a lab and is injected right into your fatty tissue. Unlike supplements, medical professionals are fully transparent about the ingredients in these injections.
Plus, the process is easy and quick, that’s demonstrated to you in a clinic before doing so. Doing this under a licensed medical professional will make the treatment more effective for you. Doctors will show you when and how to inject HGH, how to store it, and more. They will also retest your levels every 6 months to ensure you see noticeable results.
What are the benefits of HGH therapy?
Under a licensed medical professional, there are a lot of benefits to HGH therapy, such as the following:
- Improve growth and development
- Enhance productivity, mood, sleeping, concentration, memory retention, habits
- It helps gain muscle mass
- Aids metabolic process and your immune system
- Reduces the risk of cardiovascular diseases and is effective with kidney treatments
- Improves collagen production
- Helps with a genetic disorder known as Prader-Willi syndrome.
- Lowers the likelihood of symptoms of short bowel syndrome from occurring
Final thoughts
Overall, HGH supplements are not a suitable option to boost your GH levels. First of all, they’re not regulated by the FDA, monitored, have their labs reviewed, and there are few scientific reviews of any growth hormone supplements.
Because of this, these manufacturers are not required to publicize the exact breakdown of the ingredients in their supplements. With them not being transparent in their ingredients, there’s a higher chance you’re paying a lot of money to consume amino acids and herbs.
On the contrary, legal HGH therapy is the only effective and legal way to undergo it. If you’re interested, you have to visit a licensed medical professional who will review and diagnose your symptoms. Then, they will provide you with a treatment plan where they will show you the injections and ingredients and monitor your HGH levels.