DNP is Dangerous

If you use DNP wrong, you may go blind, or end up in the hospital on an ice bed receiving ice-water enemas as the doctors frantically try to make the temperature of your yellow and sweaty body go back down. This is not a JOKE. On the positive side, very few people have died from DNP use, although it remains a distinct possibility, as some DNP related fatalities have been reported. Outside the Bodybuilding world, DNP is used to make certain dyes, break open a capsule of it and you will see that the distinct color you get on your hands is nearly impossible to wash off. It can also be used as a fungicide, herbicide, and insecticide. Before that, in the early part of the 1900s it was used as an explosive. Clearly, this is stuff you do not want to take lightly. DNP  works by uncoupling oxidative phosphorylation, which increases the bodys temperature and metabolic rate. Synthesis of fatty acid in adipose tissue requires cooperation of mitochondrial and cytoplasmic enzymes. Mitochondria release energy from food molecules and transform energy into useable form via the production of ATP. ATP is the primary carrier of energy within your cells, and most cells die quickly in the absence of it. ATP in turn powers your muscles. What does DNP have to do with all this? DNP  depletes your muscles ATP, thus requiring your mitochondria to convert more energy from food molecules, and thus create more ATP to replace what was lost. This makes your body use more energy to do anything from walking the dog to benching 315lbs. In addition, since cellular levels of all these metabolites depend on the efficiency of mitochondrial energy conversion, a mitochondrial proton leak via uncoupling proteins (UCPs) could modulate Fatty Acid synthesis. Paradoxically,DNP  inhibits muscle contraction, even though it accelerates the ATPase activity activity of isolated myosin. ATPase is the enzyme that causes ATP molecules to release the energy they store, and myosin is a protein that (along with actin) is responsible for both muscular contraction and relaxation.