runningchick wrote:
At first I read the accounts and the burrito excuse and was like: oh that is terrible, poor girl.
But honestly, naturally occuring levels of this steroid are 0.5-1ng/ml. She tested at 5mg/ml. This is not trace amount. This is 5 times the normal level. There is NO WAY this can get in your system by accidental contamination.
I am on the fence but leaning towards guilty. Her rise to running stardom would coincide very well with microdosing steroids to get stronger.
However I think the Doping agencys should make real life tests of these type of naturally occuring levels after eating certain meats to sample the statistical fluctuations that can occur in it.
As a statistician this is the issue here: If we say 0.5-1ng/ml is the normal range then this is an average. What you need to know is where 99.5% of all naturally occuring datapoints fall. To sample this range properly you need to have a good statistical sample as a baseline. I think there can be really rigorous statistics and tests to avoid wrong convictions.
After reading up in the other thread, there was a study in which:
"Three male volunteers agreed to consume 310 g of tissues from the edible parts (meat, liver, heart and kidney) of a boar" and then tested at levels of 3.5-7.5ng/ml. This shows one can get high numbers from eating meat. BUT I highly doubt her meat burrito was made of almost a pound of pork liver. She is obviously a smaller person than the average male so she might need less meat to reach certain levels. BUT that still means she'd have to eat large amounts of liver, heart and kidney. Which she could never get from a burrito just by saying that this food truck also serves the offal. She never said she ordered one of these specific burritos. So even if there was a contamination, how much could that have been? 20g? 50g? Nowhere near enough to cause such a signal.