I’m pretty sure the mental image the author is projecting is of someone with a low but healthy body fat percentage and high functional muscle. Getting huge, via steroids or otherwise, doesn’t really match the motif of Greco-Roman sculpture.
Turning to the point on Steroids. I used to work out at the type of gym the author describes. People were mostly in Greek statue state (can’t say I’m included) and did not appear to be on steroids. I moved away from the coasts and the gym next to my home clearly has at least a history of steroid use. Everyone is gigantic. The gym is near several schools with sports programs. The lifts are all very heavy. They do not look like a statue. More like a Marvel movie character. I’d be surprised to find much steroid use in the health focused gym world as no one really expressed the same values. They wanted to look good and live a long life. They were not looking to lift heavier and heavier or look like a walking mountain.
Right - this hopefully isn't too nit-picky because it wasn't the focus of the article, but this is probably more about the author's stereotypes about what is healthy versus what is actually healthy. If you look at the longest lived people in the world (e.g. blue zone people), they don't control their diet with "surgical precision", and they don't sculpt themselves in state of the art gyms, and they don't rely on sensors to tell them how their body is doing.
They generally just eat a variety of simple foods in moderation, and perform low impact, longer lasting light exercises like walking or calisthenics.
My understanding is that those "longest lived people" are in places that had bad vital records to begin with or had them destroyed in a war and that the long lived people backdated their birth date to avoid the draft or otherwise cheat.
Wasn't the "oldest living Japanese person" discovered to have died several years previously when they went to give her an award? Possibly on multiple occasions?
“Sogen Kato was believed to be the oldest man in Tokyo up until 2010 when officials finally entered his apartment and realized that he had died at the age of 79 in 1978. His death had been kept a secret by his family who were collecting his pension. This lead to a huge search for all people over 100 years, and it turned out that Japan couldn't document the whereabouts of 234,354 supposed centenarians.”
This is true - the author asserts that there are more ultra healthy people now than at some point in the past with less abundance, but this isn't obviously true.
This isn't about steroid use, there is some aesthetic popularity to body fat levels that are probably not actually healthy, as well as some pretty dubious dietary practice that also overlaps in practice with the same population.
On the other hand the regular exercise part is clearly positive.
