Lansing — Michigan Democrats introduced a new bill this past week, known as the “weight loss products and minors act.” The bill would “prohibit the sale to minors of certain dietary supplements for weight loss or muscle building,” including common commercially available products like whey protein powder and creatine.
They just declared war on teenage muscle. This is an assault on Michigan’s aspiring bodybuilders, powerlifters, football players, and athletes of all kinds.
Specifically, the bill would require retailers to move all protein powders and weight loss products behind their counters, and check ID for everyone purchasing them, with sales prohibited to minors.
Any product that claims to help “maintain or increase muscle strength” would be banned for minors under this bill, along with products claiming to “modify, maintain or reduce body weight.”
These are products, in the case of whey protein and creatine, with proven track records for building muscle in conjunction with weightlifting, with minimal to zero side effects or health risks.
Rep. Erin Byrnes, the bill’s leading sponsor, stated, “These products can be dangerous, come with serious side effects and minors who use them are far more likely to develop body image issues, dysmorphia or eating disorders later in life.”
Rep. Laurie Pohutsky, another sponsor of the bill, made headlines earlier this year for voluntarily sterilizing herself, supposedly in fear of being forced to carry a child by the Trump administration.
Not only are they hysterically ignorant about the products they’d like to ban, but they’re completely morally incongruent on the issue of body modification for minors.
Michigan Democrats have been stalwart supporters of transgender hormone therapy and genital surgeries for minors. They support the total autonomy of minors to determine their gender, and their absolute right to pursue the full extent of medical interventions to alter their bodies within that context.
They support allowing children to make choices to halt or delay their own puberty, pursue cross-sex hormone therapy, and even surgically alter their bodies. These are therapies that render children, at the very least, permanently infertile and sexually undeveloped.
Contrary to their statements, they do actually support body dysmorphia for kids, but only when it makes them weaker.
Michigan Democrats tell young men they can become girls by cutting their dicks off, but want to stop them from buying protein powder and building muscle.
They encourage minors to dive in headfirst into the gender-transition industrial complex, even promoting gender ideology in schools, but clutch their pearls at the thought of young people using supplements which help them build muscle or lose weight.
Consider their hypocrisy even further, when you imagine some of the left’s own hallowed LGBTQ+ scenarios.
What about the transgender bodybuilders? Won’t someone think about the t-boy twunks who want to hit the gym, put on some weight, and need protein powder to build muscle? What about the teenage dolls, trying to be skinny and “fish”—they’re not allowed to lose weight with herbal supplements?
Michigan Democrats are denying young people their right to pursue gender affirmation!
If body dysmorphia among the youth is their actual concern, then the left needs to take a real look in the mirror. If they truly believed in protecting the bodies of young people, they’d look at the evidence and ban childhood gender interventions as well.
Instead, they’re screeching about teenagers trying to make gains in the gym.
The real point, buried within all the holier-than-thou talk of protecting minors, is to make our kids weaker. To keep them fat, sluggish, or worse, spun out and mutilated by a medical system run amok.
It’s a revolt against beauty itself, because beauty implies difference, and difference is offensive to the leftist mindset. Everyone must be the same, everyone is a product of the system, and if anyone rises above that, it’s because of unearned privilege, not their own determination.
The pursuit of physical beauty and performance through nutrition, athletics, and yes even dietary supplements, is offensive to their core ideals. They simply can’t stand the premise that young people with drive and initiative could lift weights, drink a protein shake, and get bigger and stronger.
We cannot allow such shallow pessimism to destroy the youth. We should encourage them, instead, to pursue the limits of their own perfection. To embrace their physicality, to grow and learn from it. To grow stronger, not weaker.
In the end, telling minors that they can never improve themselves is far more harmful than the risk of developing body dysmorphia from taking too much whey protein. It sets limits in their minds that they will never exceed, at the very time in life when their futures should seem limitless.
Bobby Mars is art director of Michigan Enjoyer. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
