transcript demystifying hormones - part 1 · 2019. 5. 7. · demystifying hormones, part 1 2...
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Demys�fying Hormones Part 1
Demys�fying Hormones,
Part 11
Hello everyone, and welcome to Hormones Demys�fied. Wish you all a good evening, this is Tracy Harrison. I also, I guess want to welcome you to our first clinical course for the 101 semester, and this is also the first course of the semester where we have the 101 and the advanced 202 semester par�cipants together. I am very excited about this month's course. It is a very rich and myth-filled topic. I had a lot of fun pu�ng this package together, and I hope you really enjoyed learning about it.
As we get started just want to give you a couple of gentle reminders that we are recording this presenta�on so that you can review it again. Either in streaming video, or you can download it to put on your iPod or some other device to listen to with ease. As we get started here, I just want to encourage you to sit back and relax, get comfortable, take a few cleansing breaths, please do feel free to adjust your headsets and your audio. I am speaking at a typical volume. For the couple of you who are joining us for this course for the first �me. I want to draw your a�en�on to the control panel for Go To Webinar. There is a tab there labeled ques�ons which you are welcome to use at in any�me to post ques�ons directly to me throughout the webinar. I do encourage you to use that as the ques�ons occur to you. I will certainly seed my comments with answers as we move along. All of your phone lines, and computer microphones are muted essen�ally here. You have plenty of privacy, you don't have to worry about background noise.
Certainly feel free to use the ques�on tool if you're having any type of technical difficulty as well. In the unlikely event that we have some sort of network disrup�on and I disappear which has happened before. Please don't exit the webinar, simply hang on and if I have to reboot my computer or whatnot I will join you as quickly as I can. Usually that only takes about three or four minutes.
Without further ado, I'm going to get started. So exci�ng. Just first of all a brief reminder about the logis�cs for our webinars. I am typically pos�ng the archives first thing in the morning a�er the sessions. My commitment to you is to do so within 24 hours but certainly if you have �me available tomorrow for con�nued learning, please do check on them by around 10:00 in the morning, Eastern Time. I think you will find all of them readily available then. We are kicking off a course on hormones. I'm going to talk about hormones in aggregate to begin looking collec�vely at hormones and what are they. Then we're going to dive into the myth-riddled and o�en confusing world of sex hormones.
What do they do, what do they not do, what can go wrong and what imbalances in hormones? Tonight's discussion is going to focus quite a bit about imbalance. What imbalances can cause or be associated with the huge array of hormonal disorder that we're experiencing par�cularly in the western world these days and especially women. For this first webinar, I'm going to focus on a number of the different manifesta�ons of an imbalance called estrogen dominance.
Then in the second webinar, we'll be diving into more func�onal hormone balance, specifically with regards to perimenopause and menopause. Also men's hormone balance.
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Without further ado, I want to start off with our traditional first refresher and reminder about the ideology of
this disease in the body and all of our courses we feature and talk about the role of our environment or what I
often call the good, the bad, and the ugly. Our thoughts, our feelings, our food, our drink, our activities, our
relationships.
Aggregate create our environment and certainly our experience of wellness or illness is really simply put the
interaction of bad environment translated through our unique genetic code. Our genetic expression is always
changing. Our clients always have the hope of changing their lives from an environment of illness to one of
wellness. Some of you have seen this many times, but it's my favorite model for keeping us focused as health
counselors on our opportunity to simplify optimal health. Our challenge, our opportunity is to help our clients to
maximized what their unique body needs.
Minimize what their unique body is struggling with, and then build with them, coach them, mentor them into
creating and prioritizing an environment of healing. Then the body generally will heal itself to its maximal ability.
Of course this doesn't always happen because in certainly the modern American world we struggle to do all
three of these things. As a result, chronic diseases in the body is quite common. This is a particularly relevant
model to emphasize and kicking off this particular course because all three of these elements play huge roles in
affecting the hormones we produce, how those hormones are stored or transported, how those hormones
might be metabolized or excreted. Whether they become toxic, and so my intention for this first webinar is that
by the end you feel much, much more comfortable with the dominant hormones in the body. How they interact
and the roles that they play.
First of all, let me welcome you to the wide, wide world of hormones. Generally speaking hormones are
messengers, they are chemical messengers within the body. We have a very wide variety of them, some
hormones are responsible for triggering communication internal to a cell, or from one cell to its neighbor next
door.
The most perhaps powerful hormones are what we would call endocrine hormones which are almost universally
steroid hormones that is derived from lipids or fats that are secreted in one place in the body, but affect
function throughout the entire body. These are systemic hormones. Some body tissues are much more sensitive
to some hormones than others. As a simple example in the woman, we have an awful lot of receptors for
estrogen on cells in our breast tissue and in our uterus and this certainly make sense. We think about estrogen
having particular action there.
We may have other tissue such as in the flesh of our forearm that has very few estrogen receptors. Doesn't
mean it has zero, but many, many few, fewer and therefore it is less effective by fluctuations in estrogen. I think
the easiest way to understand the role of hormones, is that they allow us to interact with and respond to our
environment. I mean I talk about the cascade of that in just a moment. Hormones not only interact with our
experience, but they interact with each other in order to try to help the body to adapt and respond to our
environment as it changes.
The changing part is particularly key for hormones. Because they are pretty much never stagnant, they are
always changing. We think about a typical example that we're all familiar with, which is the women's menstrual
cycle. That's just one example among many of how our hormone levels are constantly shifting. One of the things
that I find particularly powerful, and amazing about them, is that they are present in such tiny amounts in the
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body. Literally a part per trillion, type of concentrations which is measured typically in picograms in the blood.
We don't have to have very much in order for them to cause real significant fluctuations in the body.
When we talk about steroid hormones, and how they interact. We're talking about an access of interconnection
in the body that encompasses a number of different organs. You can see in the diagram here, a representation
of the endocrine system. We have first of all the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland in the brain, in the head
interacting with a number of different lower tissues; glands that secretes steroid hormones to help the entire
body respond to what is being experienced in our brains.
Certainly our thoughts, our feelings can trigger responses in the hypothalamus. All of the different million
observations were making about our environment and how calm, or stressful it is constantly being processed
there, and also sending out different chemicals signals from our pituitary gland which is at the base of the brain
in the back. Going through a cascade that includes our adrenal glands, which are two small glands that sit on top
of our kidneys and our back. Our thyroid gland which is a butterfly shaped gland at the base of the throat.
Most of you have taken advantage of the adrenal thyroid course. You're going to start to really see in this
webinar how all of these glands interact with one another. Then in terms of gonadal tissue, that is for women,
the ovaries, and for men the testes. This affects reproduction. You can start to see the very powerful
interconnection between our mental, emotional experience of our observational experience of our
environment. That triggering very palpable, physiological changes in our immune system and how we react to
foreign invaders.
Our stress level, our overall metabolism, how we process nutrients what metabolic level, or level of energy
we're able to run. Then our ability to reproduce. I love this quote here from Charles Swindoll because it's a great
example of what happens in our body. "Life is about 10% what happens to you, and about 90% of how you react
to it." I think while we might focus on wanting to learn more about our client’s physiology, and how it's
performing, or not performing. It's so important to always remember that the body is following the mind not the
other way around. That more than anything our thoughts, our reactions to our environment change the
physiological cascade that happens downstream. This certainly emphasizes why the fundamentals of coaching
and the importance of primary food play a key role in our success as health counselors.
Although hormones are produced in certain glands or tissues on a regular basis. Once they are secreted, they
are active in our blood and in our cells in a bit of a dance. Influencing one another in a wide variety of ways. This
is just even a very simplified diagram explaining some of the common interactions.
Even if we start with adrenaline which chemically is epinephrine which we can all relate to as a response to
stress and how stress can immediately begin to suppress our metabolism, by suppressing thyroid hormone,
adrenaline coming from the central nervous system, kicks our adrenal gland into high gear, we're producing lots
of cortisol which directly affects insulin and how well we metabolize sugars and what our blood sugar control
become it.
Insulin, we're going to talk quite a bit about it affects the sex hormones primarily through affecting
testosterone, and all of the sex hormones. That is primarily progesterone, estrogen, testosterone, affect one
another significantly. In that way, a reaction in one part of the body, an imbalance in a particular hormone
production or binding or metabolism is likely to affect a number of other hormones. I just wanted to give one
simple example here just to highlight it for you.
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A clinical tip here which I use quite a bit. The understanding that excess estrogen in the body blocks thyroid
hormone absorption. This is really key for your clients who have issues with hypothyroidism. That is a sluggish
thyroid. Which is truly epidemic, we discuss that quite a bit in the course, truly epidemic especially in the US. A
sluggish thyroid hormone causes all sorts of different symptoms, but in particular a low sluggish metabolism
which can lead to weight gain, a feeling of fatigue, or sluggishness, coldness, and the extremities, especially in
the rear end. Other wide variety of symptoms like high elevated LDL cholesterol and constipation. All symptoms
of the body just slowing down, running at too low of the speed if you will.
Excess levels of estrogen fuels that, and I'm going to explain why as we move forward. Given we have an
epidemic of surplus estrogen or estrogen dominance. It makes it very likely that is at least in part responsible for
suppressing thyroid hormone function in your clients who are struggling with that. Keep in mind the connection
of those puzzle pieces that the thyroid is very directly affected by estrogen and vice versa. This is keen not only
for people who are trying to make thyroid hormone naturally, but also your clients who might be taking
supplemental thyroid hormone. If they make changes in their lifestyle, that would increase estrogen production
or, if they start taking birth control pills or something that has estrogen in it. It is likely going to interfere with
the thyroid negatively and they may need to adjust dosage. Just a little pearl there to keep in mind for where it
applies with your clients.
Now if you go on to the internet, and Google hormone production or hormone cascade, or hormone synthesis
flow. You will see one of hundreds and hundreds of different diagrams like the one I'm showing you here. No
worries, I am not going to make any attempt to talk you through this wonderful biochemical soup. I do want to
use as an example of explaining to you or at least showing you how complicated the dance of hormones is. Even
when we just slim our field of view down to steroid hormones.
I want to point out in this diagram some key tenets that might be of interest to you. First of all, that the starting
point for all steroid hormones in the body is cholesterol. We have so many myths in our medical media about
cholesterol being an evil substance and somehow that health is better, the least of it we have. In fact,
cholesterol is a very natural substance that the liver makes on an ongoing basis. In fact, your liver is capable of
making much higher levels of cholesterol that you could ever eat. This is just one example of why cholesterol is
vital for the body. It is the raw material, the starting point of every other steroid hormone in the body. If you
don't have enough cholesterol, you can absolutely struggle to make other hormones. In fact, another little pearl
for you is I have been seen in my practice a good, dozen, or more male clients who have come to me, having
developed erectile dysfunction after having been on statin cholesterol suppressing medications after about a
year or so.
It's a very simple straight forward explanation that they have reduced cholesterol in their body to the point that
it is starting to interfere what their body's base need for raw materials for making hormones like testosterone.
Which plays a huge role in sexual function. You may also notice that in addition to a huge variety of hormones,
some of which you heard of, some of which you haven't. There are. There is always an enzyme involved in
converting one hormone into another. In that sense, our ability to keep a good balance soup of hormones is
highly dependent on our enzyme function which at least in part is affected by our genetics.
Many of us are genetically program to overproduce or under‐produce certain enzymes that allow various
hormone conversions. This is why when two different people may take for example supplemental progesterone
or testosterone it doesn't always have the same effect, and it doesn't always lead down the same pathway. For
example, here progesterone you can see down the couple of pathways can be converted using an enzyme
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cascade to go this way, or to go down an enzyme cascade to lead to cortisol or to further be converted to lead
down toward testosterone or even further into the world of estrogen.
The response to progesterone supplementation is going to be different for each unique person. This is why
testing hormone levels overtime especially when people are trying to increase or decrease them is very
important. It's really difficult to guess what that unique individual's body is going to do with those. You can see
here in this diagram, we've got a mixture of adrenal hormones and also sex hormones. You can also see that
they are not produced independently. For example, progesterone is the precursor to all of the other
downstream sex hormones. DHEA is an androgen, a male hormone which is also the precursor to all of the other
sex hormones in the body.
Women cannot make estrogen's without also being able to make testosterone and without also having ample
supplies of the upstream hormones. The concept of looking up stream is something that we're going to focus on
quite a bit in this discussion. Because so often I think in conventional medicine, one might look at what is
perceived to be a deficiency in a hormone such as testosterone and think that the best solution is giving more
testosterone. As opposed to the myriad opportunities to look upstream and really find the root cause of the
deficiency or the imbalance. We always want to try and correct problems upstream wherever possible in order
to help the improvement to be lasting and also to help prevent unintended consequences and side effects.
The primary message here certainly not asking you to memorize any of this, it's not really important in terms of
helping our clients but really to recognize that hormones don't exist independently. They are constantly being
converted one into another and what we end up with in our blood is a real soup, a very rich diverse mixed of
hormones all at one time that is constantly changing and evolving in response to our environment.
Now when we think about addressing hormones and hormones support at various levels of influence. Hormone
synthesis is not the only place to make a difference. Because synthesis is really about making it, and as I just
said, do we have the raw materials and we do have the enzymes. Once the hormone is produce, that's not the
only way in which it has an impact. Hormones have to be transported around the body and the blood supply and
then they have to make it into cell via receptors.
In the same way that with diabetes, someone can struggle with getting blood into their cells because there are
transport issues with getting the sugars out of the blood and into the cells. We can end up with hormone
imbalances or deficiencies. Because hormones can get to the cell but if our receptors aren't sensitive they can't
necessarily get inside the cells. We also have the presence of different binding proteins, something called sex
hormone binding globulin SHBG, which is very easy to measure in blood work.
A lot of physicians will run that routinely especially for men and women as they age. The various amounts of
binding proteins can really change how much hormones are really available to our cells. The hormone sensitivity
receptor as I mentioned in many cases, there's competition for two or three different hormones who want to fit
into the same receptors and we can modulate receptors. What about when the body is trying to get our
hormone levels to go up or down. I mention that they are changing all the time. When you want more, you want
to synthesize more or transport more.
If you have a desire to shift to the body by quickly dropping the level of a certain hormone. Then we are very
dependent on our body's ability to detoxify hormones. This is a great example of how as we know for many
things in the body, more of a good thing is not necessarily better. I think the best example for that is estrogen.
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While estrogen plays some extremely vital roles particularly in women's bodies, too much of it is a really bad
thing. The body wants to be able to quickly modulate levels up or down, and if we don't detoxify estrogen very
well in the liver, we end up with surplus estrogen issues, or truly estrogen toxicity.
Then lastly even if we detoxify hormones well, we still have to remove it from our body. The primary exit route
for hormones is through the GI track and for those of you in particular who have taken the disease and the gut
courses, you well know the number of things that can go wrong with the gut in particular for hormones.
Problems with low motility or constipation or problems with getting rid of fats in particular. Because hormones
are made of lipids or fats and so things like not having a gallbladder can definitely predispose someone for
having hormone toxicity issues.
I'm going to give you a number of examples as we move along, but all five of these stages are really key. As you
can start to see, many many things can go wrong. It is not just about our ability to make a hormone, or to
detoxify a hormone. Other things that we experience can very directly affect the delicate balance of hormones
that we need in order to feel fantastic, in order to live optimally.
In particular I'll just highlight a few of these, things like chronic stress. Chronic stress activates our adrenal gland,
and we send out very high level of cortisol on a regular basis when we have chronic stress. As a steroid
hormone, cortisol affects levels of all the other hormones in our blood and in our tissues, I'll show you that as
we move along.
Things that cause significant inflammation in the body, like smoking or food sensitivities. Inflammatory
chemicals affect our receptors on our cells and how well they do or don't bind with hormones. Toxins when we
have other toxins in our body that might be keeping our livers very busy, we may not have as much
detoxification effort available to apply to processing hormones on an ongoing basis.
Obesity, this is a central point in our conversation in this webinar. Adipocytes that is fat cells generate estrogen.
Contrary to common myth the estrogen is produced all throughout the body in fat tissue not just in the ovaries.
When someone is obese, they can actually have a hysterectomy and still have quite high levels of estrogen.
Because all of those fat cells are capable of converting other hormones into estrogen, and do so readily. Just an
example of all the different puzzle pieces you want to consider as you learn more about your clients and what's
going on with them, and how their hormones might be affected.
These hormones are coming from a variety of different places in the body and I want to summarize just a bit of it
here for you. Because for purposes of steroid hormones, there is in particular a huge interaction between the
adrenal glands, which is where we are producing our bodies primary stress hormone which is cortisol and the
backup to cortisol which is DHEA. Then our gonads, or our ovaries and testes which is where we are producing
during fertile years, the majority of the sex hormones.
A phenomenon that I think is really key for all of us to understand, because of the culture in which we live is just
how readily the body will prioritize the need to survive over the need to reproduce. This is a major trigger for or
cause of infertility in women. It's just like a plant, that we might try to grow in weak soil, or maybe put it in poor
light or perhaps not water it frequently enough, or expose it to low temperatures and a plant under stress will
not flower in the same way that a human being, a woman under acute stress will not reproduce.
Given the priority, the body is going to put its raw material in its enzymes down the pathway that helps us to
respond to stress, which is, what is colloquially called a cortisol steal. The body will when the right impetus is
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there, when we're in a stressful environment, or we're choosing to have a stressful reaction to our environment.
The body is going to prioritize the cortisol pathway. As a result, we will necessarily get less production down the
reproductive pathways. This can even have effects on the mineral corticoids in terms of affecting electrolyte
balance in the kidneys.
It's actually one of the reasons just one, but certainly a palpable reason why stress affects blood pressure,
because of electrolyte imbalance. It's very important to understand that stress affects all of the other hormones.
Not only because of high levels of cortisol that directly interact with other hormones, but because it can steal
away raw material and production in various tissues of the other hormones that we need to thrive.
Okay, all right. Let's move on to the sex hormones in particular. I'm going to spend several minutes talking
through in particular the sex hormone pathway here. Because I do think it's very important that you understand
this. This particular diagram takes you all the way from synthesis through to excretion. Once again cholesterol is
not the bad guy. We're going to have a really good time busting that myth during our cardiovascular course. If it
plays such a vital role in the body, it can’t hardly be all bad. It's important to realize that for sex hormones in
particular that progesterone and DHEA are starting points.
In particular progesterone is a starting point for the synthesis of other hormones. In that sense we want to have
a balance of hormones across all of these, but if we're suffering from a lack of progesterone we're necessarily
going to suffer from the imbalance further downstream. This once again goes back to the notion of looking
upstream in order to try and address the root causes of imbalances.
Progesterone in women is made all throughout the fertile years, in both the ovaries and the adrenals. Once a
woman begins the very, very early perimenopausal stages. Which contrary to common belief, is not just the one
or two years before menopause. It's actually the 10 to 15 years before menopause, progesterone level starts to
go down. We become very dependent on our adrenal gland and in order to pick up the slack if you will, and help
to provide surplus progesterone as well. Keep in mind what we just reviewed. If the adrenal gland is really busy
making a lot of stress hormones and flooding us with cortisol so that we're protected from our stressful
response to life.
The adrenal gland doesn't have a lot of energy left over to make progesterone. It's too busy making cortisol. This
is one of the biggest reasons why progesterone deficiency in perimenopausal women or in particular
premenopausal women between the ages of 35 and 50 is a huge issue. Because we tend to live very busy
lifestyles. We're very busy going and doing, going and doing. Accelerated stress really takes away our bodies
ability to keep us in sufficient amounts of progesterone.
Now let's talk for a moment about estrogen because again in a woman, in particular estrogen is not just made in
the ovaries. It can also be made in the adrenal gland, it can be made in all of our fat tissue, and most importantly
we have a huge amount of what you would call exogenous or external estrogen coming in from things like
hormone replacement and oral contraceptives and meat and dairy. Also a wide variety of chemicals that I'm
going to talk about in detail. We don't just have sources of estrogen made internally from our body, from a
variety of places but also externally.
This is a major driver for imbalance in the body because our HPATG access is not really designed to effectively
assess all of these external estrogen's coming in. This is a phenomenon that's really come upon us just since
World War II with the explosion of commercial chemical use. Many of which unfortunately look a lot like
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estrogen in terms of molecule shape and affinity. If the chemical can fit into an estrogen receptor on a cell, then
as far as your body is concerned, it is reacting to estrogen.
It is going to show downstream effects of higher levels of estrogen because there is a chemical not estrogen, but
an estrogen like chemical fitting into those receptors and essentially tricking the body into thinking our estrogen
levels are higher naturally than they really are. This is a huge, huge driver for hormone imbalance, and in
particular for estrogen dominance in women. We have an epidemic of estrogen dominance. We have a huge
surplus of places estrogen can come from. Our progesterone gets really easily overwhelmed by our stress
response. It makes it very difficult for the body to keep progesterone and estrogen in balance.
Another myth that I want to address right off the bat, we'll be talking quite a bit about menopause in the second
webinar. Again contrary to common myth. When a woman reaches menopause technically when she has stop
having a menstrual period for an entire year. Her ovaries are still making estrogen. Unless she's had a full fledge
hysterectomy. Her ovaries are still making estrogen; her body fat is still making estrogen.
Until extremely late menopause, for example women when they get into their mid‐70s for the 25 years or so in
between menopause and hitting the mid '70s. Most women do not have a deficiency of estrogen at all. In fact,
they may often have a surplus estrogen. Estrogen deficiency suffering from low estrogen is actually extremely
uncommon. We are unfortunately seeing a lot of women being pre‐dispose for cancer, estrogen mediated
cancer by using supplemental estrogen when they really don't need it.
Another key point I'd like to make on this slide is, the role of our diet. When we eat carbohydrate foods, we
know that we have to secrete a hormone called insulin. Now insulin is a metabolic hormone, it is not a
reproductive hormone. It's part of the dance of the hormones. Insulin effects all of these other hormones. When
we eat a high glycemic diet, or a diet that is particularly high in carbohydrates of any kind. We stimulate our
pancreas which is a pea pod shaped gland behind the stomach to secrete large amount of insulin.
When we overproduce insulin, and create insulin surges in our body, we know that insulin promotes the
conversion of hormones away from progesterone. Insulin actually stimulates the conversion of progesterone
into testosterone. Women even stimulate conversion of estrogen into testosterone. So that we can end up with
an imbalance between testosterone and estrogen in women, which we'll talk about in just a moment. In men,
too much insulin up regulates aromatase which is one of those lovely enzymes, we talked about earlier.
Aromatase promotes the conversion of testosterone to estrogen.
Then that can create an imbalance between those two. We think about testosterone is being a dominant male
hormone than it is. When men have too much estrogen, they will exhibit those effects. Things like developing
softer skin, and more belly fat, and lower muscle mass, lower libido, and even taken into an extreme, they can
begin to develop gynecomastia or swollen breast because of a hormone imbalance. Insulin plays a really key role
here, and as you might imagine given we all know that substandard American diet insulin mediated changes in
sex hormones are rampant.
I want you to start thinking about the role of insulin in the back of your mind because it plays a key piece here in
creating testosterone dominance which we see in some conditions like PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome and
also estrogen dominance which we see in cases like severe premenstrual syndrome or even premenstrual
dysphoric disorder which is a fancy phrase for really bad PMS. You can start to see some of the dynamics here.
You don't need to understand all that hormone soup that I showed you before in terms of the biochemistry.
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This diagram well captures the primary dynamics that you're going to see and have an opportunity to help
modulate in your clients. I just want to mention here I'm going to expand this diagram in terms of detoxifying
estrogen later on. Keeping in mind that the gut is ultimately where surplus hormones have to be secreted from.
If we have dysbiosis or an imbalance or gut microbes or low motility or constipation or some kind of bacterial or
yeast overgrowth that's creating inflammation in the gut. There's all sorts of chemical things that can happen
that cause hormones to be reabsorbed.
Instead of being escorted out with the trash if you will via our stool. They get reabsorbed through the intestinal
wall and put right back into the system. Despite the body is desire or drive to detoxify hormones and get the
levels down. We can end up rapidly reabsorbing them and being essentially toxic for hormones. The gut does
play a key role here.
I'd like to talk next about some of these key primary sex hormones. We are all well familiar with estrogen. It's a
really key hormone and it has some absolutely critical effects that allow a women's body to be prepared for
conceiving a child and then preparing the womb to support cell division and growth in order to allow the growth
into a fetus.
These are some of the things that make a lot of sense when you think about a body being prepared to conceive
and carry a child. Things like calorie storage, and calorie conservation. We obviously need a lot of energy in
order to feed a growing fetus and to give it lots of nutrients and so the body does tend to down regulate
metabolism a bit, put on extra body fat as a storage source for calories. We do tend to develop a preference for
high energy foods and particular sweets.
There's a stimulation of the development of an endometrium which would be the initial resting place and
growing place for a fertilized egg. It changes in our ability to lactate in order to breastfeed a child or support
directly by estrogen. There's a key hormone role in slowing the bodies breakdown of bone tissue, so that we
have good strong skeletal support in order to carry it around a child inside while pregnant and also to support it
after birth. Estrogen helps to make the cardiovascular system more resilient so that it is less vulnerable to
inflammation.
We know that low levels of estrogen and women and low levels of testosterone and men are definitely
correlated with a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease and also cardiovascular inflammation on just simple
things like hypertension. Estrogen has a number of different emotional and neurological effects that help to
prepare a woman for empathy and strong caring an intuition about caring for a child. Tends to make women
very emotionally sensitive and aware. Now part of the challenge for estrogen is that when one is preparing for
or actually in the act of conceiving and carrying a child.
These are all wonderfully powerful. I'm sure you can start to see that these same effects could be really
troublesome and debilitating when they occur for other reasons, when they are not needed. Many of these
things I'm sure sound a lot like what our clients might experience in extreme, with really bad premenstrual
syndrome. For example, craving sweets, feeling bloated, gaining extra weight, feeling emotionally vulnerable.
Weepiness, painful breast, or lumpy breast tissue, cramping in the uterus, very heavy blood flow in their
menstrual periods. These are all signs of estrogen dominance, of estrogen effects being exhibited in the body at
a time outside of conception and pregnancy.
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Now on the other side of the coin. I'd like to introduce you to progesterone. The easiest way to explain the role
of progesterone is to simply say that it keeps estrogen under control. Many different ways, progesterone and
estrogen are complimentary and antagonistic. Very high levels of one without the other, would cause all sorts of
toxic effects in the body, and we do need both.
Certainly in an upstream manner, our ability to produce estrogen is dependent first of all on progesterone as a
precursor. We've already talked about the competition between progesterone and our bodies desire to respond
to stress. Not only does that have to do with hormone synthesis. In terms of whether there's a cortisol steel, so
that the adrenal gland can make a lot of cortisol in respond to stress. It's also very key to keep in mind that
progesterone and cortisol. Progesterone and our primary stress hormone compete for the very same receptors
on cells.
This is a great example of how receptor availability and sensitivity can have a direct effect on how people feel in
response to their hormones. If I am a typical type A workaholic and I'm trying to juggle too many things and I'm
very stressed and I feel wired most of the time and I don't get enough sleep, and I don't make time for exercise
and I certainly don't have enough time for my primary food or to nourish myself. I will probably have chronically
high cortisol levels. The cellular receptors that can take in cortisol are going to be chronically loaded up with
cortisol.
Now it may be that my body has plenty of progesterone. I'm producing it, it's not bound, it's available. If all of
my receptors are full of cortisol. I'm not going to be allowed to feel the effects, the very positive effects of
progesterone. Simply because all of my receptors are filled. This is a way in which understanding the adrenal
health of one of your clients can give you really key puzzle pieces of information about what might be happening
to them from a hormone perspective. A sex hormone perspective.
It's a great physiological example of how stress and the adrenal glands response, directly affects things like
fertility. If the body cannot experience progesterone in the cells. Even if I have it in my bloodstream. If I can't
experience it in my cells, it is very likely that I will be unable to conceive a child, because progesterone is
required in order to not only to conceive but also to carry a child. Sub‐optimal progesterone is a major cause of
miscarriage. Progesterone is protective, and I want to give you a number of examples of how it interacts with
estrogen in terms of having effects that counter one another.
Now I'm not going to talk through all of these, you can certainly look through them at your leisure. I want to just
point out a couple of different examples. When someone's estrogen dominant or when they're going through a
period in their menstrual cycle, when estrogen is really high. One of the thing that estrogen does is it promotes
sodium retention and as a result therefore fluid retention or swelling in the body. On the other hand,
progesterone is a natural diuretic. I have seen an awful lot of women put on hypertension medications. Simply
because there is a hormone imbalance, and if you help them to address the hormone imbalance, they don't
need to be on those medications. There's a common myth that estrogen is the most important hormone with
regard to avoiding osteoporosis or it's osteopenia and its progression to osteoporosis. In fact, there are certainly
a role for estrogen in that it restrains or controls the rate in which our body breaks down old bone. Our bone
tissue is constantly being reformed and broken down.
While estrogen would slow the activity of osteoclast. Osteoclast are bone cells that break down bone tissue. Its
progesterone that actually stimulates the growth of new bone tissue, or new bone cells. Again they both have
an important role, but emphasizing estrogen to the determent of progesterone is just going to leave us with a
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lot of leftover old bone, that may look dense, it will end up being incredibly brittle because it is old. This is one of
the reasons why using estrogen hormone or medications that preserve estrogen in the body, without taking a
look at progesterone can lead to a huge incidence of fractures and post‐menopausal women. Because it's one
thing to have dense bone, it's another thing to have strong flexible bone and that is dependent on progesterone.
Another key point is the last one here. When we have large amounts of estrogen where estrogen dominant. It
actually slows the clearance of testosterone from the body. Slows the body’s ability to detoxify testosterone.
What this means is that high estrogen, very often goes hand in hand with high testosterone in women. On the
other hand, progesterone speeds up testosterone clearance and thus plays a really key role in keeping
hormones balance.
As I'm going to describe in just a few moments. Elevated testosterone is incredibly common in women who have
polycystic ovarian syndrome or PCOS. A major pathway for helping them with that is to support the production
and the receptor uptake of progesterone in the body. It will help to have the downstream benefit of ridding the
body of surplus testosterone. You can see it's not that either of them is toxic, they're both very necessary but
the balance of them is really critical. Generally speaking the vast majority of women especially in American
culture are going to struggle with having the effects of too much estrogen and the effects of having not enough
progesterone.
There's a question posted which says if you add more progesterone, wouldn't that compete with the cortisol for
the receptors and kick out some of the cortisol. Absolutely. That's one of the reasons why one of the
experiences when women use bioidentical progesterone cream is they find that their stress level in general goes
down. They have a perceived lower stress response which is one of the wonderful side effects. The answer to
your question is yes, and it's one of the wonderful benefits of bioidentical progesterone.
Okay, now incredibly important point based on the dynamics I just mentioned is what I've put down here in the
body. I'm going to repeat this many times in this course, because I think it's such a huge clinical pearl and vital
role that we can play in educating our clients. There's virtually never a logical reason for a woman to be using
supplemental estrogen without also including some progesterone. We know beyond the shadow of a doubt,
that surplus estrogen predisposes women for every type of hormonally driven cancer there is.
We know that progesterone, again if it's not in surplus which is quite rare actually. The progesterone is
protective for that, and so women who are unfortunately taking supplemental estrogen in hopes that it's just
going to help them through menopause are actually really putting themselves at risk, for taking estrogen
dominance and turning it into estrogen toxicity. I'm going to talk a bit about testing for hormones and really
understanding the net levels of hormones in our body.
You can already start to see the average American women has got a lot of stress. She's definitely got body fat;
she's definitely got a standard American diet that's promoting insulin. She's got all of the factors that are going
to predispose her for estrogen vulnerability.
Now I want to move on to talking about testosterone. Which is a hormone that women have to have.
Testosterone in a women's body is responsible for our sex drive. If we have absolutely no testosterone, then
we're going to have absolutely no libido. No sex drive, no interest in sex.
Testosterone also helps women with retaining appropriate muscle mass with having effective fat metabolism in
our cells, so we don't gather too much body fat. It helps with general mood elevation and energy. Also with
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focus, task focus and memory. There is indeed a fine line from the woman on the left, who perhaps has nice
healthy levels of testosterone which allows her to have a little bit of good muscle definition, nothing crazy. In
order to be fit and slim and positive minded.
Then on the right hand side, the woman who is clearly struggling with surplus testosterone and as a result is
experiencing the growth of facial hair. Actually cut off this photo, but the other thing she's suffering with is some
top of the head balding. These kind of hair characteristics that we expect to see in men. That is what happens
when one sex or the other has too much of the opposing hormone. Woman who have surplus testosterone are
going to start to look and act a little bit like men.
Men on the other hand who have a little surplus estrogen are more likely to start acting and looking a little bit
more like women. It is really our sex hormones that determine what we think of as our unique sex
characteristics that make us more like a women or more like a man. Testosterone is the primary androgen, or
what we would think of as male hormone. The other significant one for woman in particular is DHEA. Which
again is a sex hormone precursor but it's also an adrenal hormone.
An area I’ve already mentioned the number of things that it's really vital for, but low levels of testosterone can
absolutely happen for women who struggle with low level of the upstream hormones. Especially in women who
eat good healthy, low glycemic diets. If they have low DHEA, because of maybe adrenal exhaustion, or they have
low progesterone, because of a chronic stress. They may really suffer with not having enough of the
downstream testosterone hormone. It's very common especially for women in their '40s and '50s to start to
struggle with low libido or picking up extra body fat. Very often low testosterone is part of the problem.
Now on the opposite side of that, excess androgens particularly excess testosterone can cause not only the
facial hair that I mentioned earlier, but also acne. It is the primary driver for polycystic ovarian syndrome. It can
also as a result cause infertility, because the vast majority of women who have PCOS do not ovulate. If you don't
ovulate, you can't release an egg from a follicle, in order to allow conception. Excess testosterone can also make
women very irritable. The phrase, testy, when someone gets testy that is an adjective that comes directly from
the word testosterone. Can cause a real sense of impatience and moodiness in women. Now we have an
epidemic of this, and PCOS is very quickly becoming an epidemic because the standard American diet is one that
triggers the secretion of high amount of insulin. When there is, as I already mentioned, there are high levels of
insulin in the blood, trying to respond to our diet, insulin stimulates the ovaries to overproduce testosterone.
When it does, it causes all sorts of problems with inconsistent or imbalance menstrual cycles. This is perhaps the
most direct example of how our diet very directly affects our entire hormonal experience. I also want to bust a
few myths about levels of testosterone. There are a lot of people who believe that women have these minuscule
levels of testosterone relative to estrogen. In fact, that's not true. We typically have, only about 1/10th of the
level of testosterone that men have.
We actually have quite a bit of it, and you can see here on the graph on the lower right hand corner, across the
life cycle of women at various phases, how in general the average levels of testosterone and estrogen change
overtime through adulthood, going through the estrogen craziness of perimenopause and then the fall of
estrogen post menopausally getting into the real senior years where estrogen doesn't really plummet until the
late '70s or even '80s. You might notice, testosterone levels ramp up in early adulthood, and then they do fall off
of but it's really quite slow actually. Generally speaking, if we have good amounts of upstream hormones like
progesterone and DHEA we have the ability to have good stable levels of testosterone.
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As I'm often telling my female clients, the good‐ability to enjoy good libido, good sex drive, a nice healthy sex
life. Well, well until our later years. Stress is the number one thing that gets in the way of this.
Okay, so having reviewed all of that, we have the opportunity to add a little more detail to our potential points
of influence. Some of the examples we talked about. If cholesterol overall is too low, it can be difficult to kick off
appropriate synthesis of sex hormones. If your typical diabetic client, or someone who's pre‐diabetic or just who
has extra body fat around their middle. Surplus, visceral fat and that kind of apple shaped body. That is almost
always insulin driven body fat which is a good heads‐up that even in the absence of a formal diagnosis, of pre‐
diabetes or diabetes that those clients are struggling with insulin resistance. Therefore, are probably going to
struggle with over conversion of hormones by insulin.
Hormone transport, we know that too much alcohol and also stress not only that the cortisol fit into receptors,
but both alcohol and stress and surplus create more sex hormone binding globulin. When hormones are bound,
not only are the receptor sides taken up. When hormones are bound they can't fit into receptors anyway. This is
another major issue with regard to fertility. The body has to sense that we have plenty of free flowing unbound
hormones, in order to reproduce effectively. As I mentioned, sex hormones binding globulin is something that
can be measure in the blood and a clinical tip for you, I'll add that to the slides before I post them is that an
herbal product that has stinging nettle in it. Stinging nettle is a plant that is very effective at reducing sex
hormone binding globulin. That hormones are freer to have natural action.
Low progesterone, one of the things that it does in the body is that it makes estrogen receptors more sensitive.
Not only does simply having low progesterone reduce competition for estrogen, it actually makes cellular
receptors more sensitive. When you think about tissue that has a lot of receptors in it like our breast. It makes
those tissues very vulnerable to fibroids or tissue dysfunction. Fibrocystic breast lumpiness in breast tissue, little
painful, little hard spots, or clumps or lumps is really quite common in women. Some women experience it all
the time, other women experience it cyclically during their menstrual cycle.
The primary driver for that is low progesterone and certainly if women start taking for example using
bioidentical progesterone cream, if they choose to apply it for a period of time to their breast, versus other
tissue. They'll find that it makes the fibroids go away. That's not the only thing that works for that. I'll mention
some other examples to you. One of I think the most effective tools for reducing breast fibroids is an herbal
supplement called chaste tree berry. Which is very effective at reducing that cellular sensitivity and also
boosting natural progesterone production.
Another supplement that works very well for reducing estrogen receptor sensitivity is iodine as an element. It's
part of what naturally keeps the receptors sensitivity in a balanced place and we do have quite a high incidence
of iodine deficiency. Maybe not deficient enough to cause problems with the thyroid gland. In truth every cell in
our body needs some amount of iodine. There's a difference in having enough iodine to make thyroid hormone
versus having enough iodine to really make all your cells replete in order to keep receptors balanced. That can
be a problem in terms of hormone dysfunction.
If we have low supply of vitamins B12 and B6 and B9, or folate. We end up with impaired detoxification
processes in our body. In particular, a liver detox processed called methylation which is absolutely required in
order to get rid of estrogen. If you don't methylate well, you will not be able to successfully get rid of estrogen
and it will tend to stay in circulation and cause problems when the body is trying to drive levels low, and then is
incapable of doing so.
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A little clinical pearl here if you have clients who have seem to exhibit symptoms of estrogen dominance, and
they also have cardiovascular problems like hypertension or if you have the opportunity to get their
homocysteine level measured. A woman who has elevated homocysteine absolutely has problems with
methylation because that's a ... methylation is a process that helps the body to keep balance levels of
homocysteine. We're going to talk about that in our cardiovascular class. Sometimes women present with
hormone problems, and also cardiovascular problems at the same time, and poor methylation maybe at the
core of both of those challenges.
Then lastly in terms of excretion, there is an enzyme in our intestines called beta‐glucuronidase which is a pesky
little thing, that unfortunately will go along and clip estrogen from its bile molecules. From its bound bile
molecules that's trying to get it out of the body and essentially free the estrogen so that it actually reabsorbed
through the intestinal wall right back into the bloodstream. High levels of beta‐ glucuronidase can cause a lot of
issues with estrogen surplus or estrogen toxicity because the body will use up a lot of nutrients in order to try
and detoxify it.
Only to have it get absorbed again and go back through for detoxification again, and again, and again and
eventually perhaps cause an estrogen toxicity or a higher risk of cancer.
Because estrogen is a steroid hormone and meaning of a fat based molecule, or lipid based molecule. We do
have to have bile in order to get the conjugated estrogen out of our liver and down through bile duct and down
through the GI Tract. If someone who doesn't have a gallbladder is going to struggle more with detoxifying or
excreting hormones. That's something that taking bile acid factors, or bile salts will really help them to be able
to do that. It will also help them to absorb their fats better, so that their stools are not loose and fatty and
having real strong aroma is generally a people who don't have a gallbladder who have low gallbladder function,
if they don't supplement with bile salts. They tend to miss out on fat soluble vitamins, and they also struggle to
excrete fat based toxins like estrogen.
A lot of pearls on this page and this is just an example of some things that can be opportunities for influence and
points to consider around what's going on with your unique client.
Okay let's see. Should older women then be supplementing with estrogen? That's a great question, that's really
going to depend on the women. When we look at women that are 75 years of age or older those who are
predispose to osteoporosis or who have a lot of estrogen deficiency symptoms then absolutely they may find
that they get quite a bit of relief supplementing with estrogen. I mean you talk about that more in the second
webinar, but I think there is a real opportunity to help women by the use of weak estrogen rather than strong
ones. I'll define that for you in the next webinar.
Again, I really believe that needs to always come into the body with the support of supplemental progesterone
to make absolutely sure that she is being protected from estrogen gone wild. Okay so let's talk for a moment
about the menstrual cycle. Which is an orchestrated dance of all of these hormones that women experience on
approximately a monthly basis. I want to talk first of all about how the menstrual experience for women has
really changed and this is perhaps a great summary of how much things have changed, just in the past hundred
years in contrast to the tens of thousands of years before that when women were certainly having menstrual
cycles and reproducing.
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When you look even just a hundred years ago, women started their menstrual cycles at a later age typically
around age 16. They tended to get pregnant earlier they tended to get pregnant more often, they tended to
breast feed their children almost universally and for a much longer period of time. Much closer to the first 2
years or so of life before solid food would be given. They tended to experience earlier menopause, they did not
live as long, and as a result they had in contrast a much smaller number of total menstrual cycles in their life.
Versus today, because I think in large part the influence of all the hormones in our food, and in our environment
girls are starting their menstrual period at a much younger age. The average today is about 12, and it certainly
not unheard of for it to be as young as 9 or 10. Women generally have fewer pregnancies, and many more
woman are choosing not to have children at all. There is less of an overall use of breastfeeding for feeding
newborns and even where it's chosen it tends to be a shorter choice where infants for convenience are moved
to formulas or animal milks or even solid food at earlier ages.
We tend to have later menopause. We tend to live longer. The net result is about close to, and this is just
averages, it's just rough math. It certainly going to vary by person. Roughly twice as many menstrual cycles. We
also have much more stress which means we experience less progesterone, and we deal with many, many, many
more times of xeno or external estrogen's. The women a hundred years ago could have even contemplated
much less experience. Today's experience, today's women's experience today is really quite different. Our
tissues are subjected to much wider swings in hormone levels for a much longer period of time, especially to the
effects of estrogen.
People ask all the time, how come for example cancer is such an explosive disease now? Why don't we have so
much cancer a 100 years ago. I would argue when the hormone‐mediated arena, that this page describes very
well why we have an explosion of cancer now and why it was relatively unheard of 100 years ago.
There’s a question that just popped out about beta‐glucuronidase. I am going to come back to that, so I’ll
answer your question later on.
Okay, so let’s take a look at what the menstrual cycle is, because I think it’s really important that we feel
comfortable describing this to our female clients and being able to talk to what’s happening. The diagram you
see on the right is something that I will put on a slide and post for you in the course documents. You can
certainly find it on your own online, but I find it’s really nice to have as a handout in terms of showing to my
clients and using as a talking tool, or a teaching tool, when I meet with them.
For most women, the menstrual cycle is approximately a month long and it has two key phases that line up on
either side of ovulation. The whole point of the menstrual cycle is to prepare the body for nourishing, or
nurturing an egg and then releasing it out into the body for purposes of fertilization, and then if it does not
become fertilize, the process of sloughing off away the preparation for that particular egg so that the body can
simply begin again in order to do the same thing over and over and over again.
There are generally two phases of the menstrual cycle that are recognized. There is the follicular phase and
there is the luteal phase, and hormone levels vary wildly throughout these two phases. One clinical tip is, you do
not ever, ever want to go and get your hormone levels measures without knowing exactly where you are in your
menstrual cycle, and generally speaking, the most useful time to get your hormones measured is in the middle
of the luteal phase, approximately around day 21 and I’ll come back to that in just a second. But the beginning of
each menstrual cycle is the first day of consistent menstrual bleeding.
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This of the sloughing off of the endometrium, the preparation that the body had made for nourishing a fertilized
egg, and literally beginning of day two, even while the bleeding continues, beginning on day two, the body has
already started the preparation for beginning again. There is activity happening in the follicles in order to create
the competition for which egg is going to be released first. In the follicular phase, estrogen is the primary active
hormone, and you can see in the gray line here, just a representative curve showing that estrogen is gradually
increasing during the follicular phase.
Ovulation happens when estrogen gets to a high enough level that it causes a spike in luteinizing hormone,
which triggers ovulation. In women, sometimes their follicular phase is very short, maybe it’s only eight days
long. In other women, it’s very long, it maybe 20 days long. It’s all a matter of how quickly their estrogen levels
are able to rise, and that is going to be determined by some of the factors we’ve already discussed, but also
based on just their genetic enzyme levels. That hormone soup I showed you.
We all have various sundry levels of those hormones that play a role in our fertility and the follicular phase can
really vary in length, but it is a phase during which estrogen is a primary rising hormone and the follicular phase
ends at ovulation, which occurs as a result of a very quick spike in luteinizing hormone, which is the pink line
that you see here, right here, that triggers that ovulation. And then the luteal phase after ovulation is really a
progesterone dominant phase where estrogen generally is falling off, but it’s progesterone that is rising.
The rise in progesterone during that time period is preventing multiple ovulations. It is preparing the
endometrium in order to be able to bring more blood vessels to a fertilized egg. It’s getting ready to nourish a
fertilized egg with the assumption that it is going to happen after ovulation, so it’s providing preparation.
Certainly if fertilization occurs and conception takes place, then the progesterone levels are going to skyrocket.
They will actually grow to be 20 times higher than they are during a menstrual cycle, so sometimes, I get
questions about, “Are higher progesterone level safe in the women’s body?”
Absolutely, they are because during a good healthy pregnancy, they’re going to rise exponentially. But in a good
balanced body, we should have an aggressive rise in progesterone, that generally speaking is going to reach its
peak around the midpoint of the luteal phase, and then if fertilization has not happened during this, in particular
this key window here, post ovulation, then the progesterone level will start to go down and our fertility falls off.
You can certainly still be pregnant during this window frame, but it’s less common, and the progesterone levels
are going down in preparation for sloughing off that preparation and trying again the following month.
Now we’re going to talk about PMS in detail, but I just want you to realize in context of this particular picture
here that if day one is the first full day of menstrual bleeding, then what most women would think of as their
PMS window is really the last week of their menstrual cycle. Depending on the length of the PMS, it’s typically
the four to seven days before menstrual bleeding actually takes place, and this is where women can have a lot of
debilitating symptoms. Now I just want you to know that during that time frame, in a good healthy body that is
able to modulate hormones rapidly, estrogen levels have come way down and progesterone is dominant. That
would be the goal.
It’s my experience that it is definitely not the more common outcome in women’s bodies it is much more likely
that the body cannot detoxify estrogen very well, or the natural levels of estrogen are much higher, and so, even
as they start to fall off during the luteal phase, estrogen can still be more dominant than progesterone and it is
that estrogen dominance that causes those estrogenic type of symptoms that feel very uncomfortable, and
create a lot of both the physical and the emotional havoc that women feel in having really bad PMS.
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Alright, so hopefully, this allows you to feel more comfortable really describing what’s happening during the
menstrual cycle and what’s taking place. Again, this is just a prototypical kind of diagram that I have included for
sake of ease. One of the things that I am going to post under the course documents is a diagram that shows
more the full range of levels, so instead of having lines, it’s going to have big bands to help you understand the
incidents of some of these estrogen dominant type of windows during the menstrual cycle. But it’s a
combination of post ovulation with too high of estrogen and too low of progesterone, that magic window that
makes women feel terrible during that window of time.
Okay, so let’s see. I think we got a couple of questions here. Measuring progesterone for women who have had
a hysterectomy? Well, I think you are fair to assume that a woman who has had a hysterectomy, unless she is
very, very skinny and not stressed. By definition, she is going to be estrogen dominant, because when she has a
hysterectomy, she can produce no progesterone at all other than her adrenal gland, but her body fat is making
estrogen. It’s pretty much given she’s going to be estrogen dominant. I do think there’s a question about testing.
I think by far, the most accurate way to test the sex hormones is in saliva. I’m going to cover that in detail
actually in the second webinar.
Okay, I've talked to... I’ve pointed, hinted a little bit about estrogen dominance and now I just want to cover it in
a little more detail. As we discussed in the very beginning, hormonal health by and large, is not so much about
the absolute levels of any one hormone. It’s about balance of hormone, because it’s a soup, and it’s not so much
that you maybe don’t want carrots in your soup or you don’t want celery in your soup, but you’d probably be
pretty bummed out if 90% of your soup was celery, which is with just a few token carrots. It’s really about
balance in the soup, and by far, the most common imbalance challenge that women today in Western countries
have is estrogen dominance. There are a lot of issues that contribute to this and I’m going to talk through them
in detail now. We absolutely struggle with excess estrogen in a big way. Beyond having too much of it perhaps,
we struggle to detoxify and excrete it, so even when we have too much and the body’s trying to correct it, it
can’t necessarily get rid of it.
We definitely struggle with having insufficient progesterone, which might be about not making enough, to the
prior example maybe because of hysterectomy, or because of perimenopause or menopause, or because of
receptor competition or receptor insensitivity, or because of things like exposure to toxins, which is one of the
things that can cause an ovulation, which just means going back to our menstrual cycle on the prior page.
An ovulation is when a woman does not ovulate, so there is no ovulation here. Estrogen has still risen, ovulation
has taken place, but unless ovulation takes place, there can be no progesterone. If ovulation doesn’t take place,
progesterone is rock bottom and there becomes an experience of pretty severe estrogen dominance. Lots of
times women think that if they have a menstrual period, they must be ovulating, and that is not true. That’s a
giant myth. There are plenty of women who are having menstrual periods who are not ovulating for a variety of
reasons, and obviously their estrogen dominance is pretty severe in those cases.
Okay, so, the combination of these three things is in large part the dynamics that in various combinations create
this estrogen dominance imbalance and I want to focus on this, because similar to all the other courses that we
have been through where we’ve talked about the thousands of different names we can give to syndromes, and
diseases, and illnesses, and disorders, and problems. Those thousands of names really just describe collections
of particular symptoms. They very often have much simpler and common root causes.
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Remember, wellness is not that complicated. There’s not that many things that can go wrong. As a perfect
example of that estrogen dominance is the imbalance that is at the root of a whole host of hormonal “disorders”
and I’ve listed a number of them there for you. It doesn’t mean it’s the only thing going on there, but it is
definitely the, or one of the, dominant triggers or mediators for those problems.
Okay, let’s see. I’m just going to check the questions here for a minute. Yes, there’s a great point as a comment
actually being made that not all hysterectomies include a total oophorectomy, which means actual just full
removal of the ovaries. Sometimes it is a partial removal or just a removal of other parts of the uterus for
example, and so, the phrase hysterectomy is really something that when someone says, “Oh, I’ve had a
hysterectomy,” you absolutely want to check on what was done. Was there full removal of the ovaries where
the ovaries touched. These days there are all sorts of different variants of “hysterectomy.”
Interestingly enough, you may not know this, the history of the word hysterectomy, was because in men’s
perception at the time 150 years ago, because pretty much all surgeons were men then. Women, at a certain
point of their lives, got hysterical when they went through menopause or started going through perimenopause
and they emotionally got hysterical, and therefore, it was called a hysterectomy as a way of helping to relieve
women from their body parts that might have been causing them to be hysterical, which is crazy view on how
limited our understanding of the human body was, and certainly, I think a disrespect for women and their
unique hormonal experience. That’s a great comment. I thank you for making that, because the phrase …
hysterectomy is generic and it doesn’t always mean the same thing.
There’s a question about a cervical cancer related to hormone balance. Yes, cervical cancer very often involves
issues with the tissue in particular. There are often receptor issues. Some pretty complicated receptor issues,
but hormone imbalance would be the thing that’s the trigger for making those receptor imbalances a problem,
so absolutely, pretty much all hormone‐mediated cancers are going to have estrogen dominance involved in
some way.
I’m going to break down each of these categories in detail, and my hope is that, these will really turn in to
checklists for you to use in your work with your clients doing the detective work to try and understand how and
why they may have estrogen dominance, and what can you help them to change about their lifestyle in order to
begin to correct it. These are not necessarily in order of intensity or importance, because each person’s, each
woman’s lifestyle varies of course.
Hormones in mass‐produced animal food sources. We all well know from our education that hormones are used
in order to accelerate growth of poultry and beef in order to make their production more economical. It’s very
important to remember that dairy foods by definition are hormone latent. They are a reproductive food, and so,
I really recommend removal of all dairy foods and not just conventionally raised ones, but all of them for women
who are really struggling with estrogen dominance.
Pesticides, and including insecticide fungicides. Things that not only might be on our food, the things we use in
our gardens are, generally speaking, not only very effective, but very strong estrogen mimickers. Since World
War II, we have introduced over 80,000 different new chemicals in commercial use and a huge variety of
applications, and a scary number of those look enough like estrogen that they will fit into receptors in our cells
and use of these kinds of things in our lifestyle, whether it’s our food or our personal hygiene product, like our
sunscreen, or our make‐up, or our household cleaning products. Those things alone can make someone with a
good low glycemic diet, pretty estrogen dominant, so you have a huge opportunity here to help someone with a
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category of detail that they’re pretty much not going to be able to get support for from their physician, or their
team due to lack of knowledge, or even just lack of time to really talk through an inventory and support people
for really methodically thinking about where they might be exposed. Chemical solvents. It can be cleaning
products, it can be things used in the garage, but it can also be nail polish remover.
Hormone replacement, things like Premarin. as I mentioned earlier, estrogen‐only hormone replacement. Just
because a woman is going through menopause and she is feeling poorly, not because of low estrogen. We’re
going to blow the lid off of that myth in the next webinar. She’s feeling poorly because estrogen levels are
fluctuating, and it’s actually very dangerous, especially for a woman who’s overweight to any degree to be given
her surplus estrogen in medication.
As I mentioned, body fat makes estrogen. Stress, unfortunately, not only downregulates progesterone, but it
also upregulates estrogen by helping us to store more body fat when we’re very stressed. You may remember
the adrenal gland makes. Sorry. The effect of the adrenal gland is to make less free T3 thyroid hormone in our
cells. Instead we tend to make high amounts of a storage form of T3 hormones, it’s called Reverse T3, which is
not metabolically active. As a result, our metabolism slows and we end up storing more of our calories as fat
even without changing our diet. High glycemic‐ looks like I deleted a line here. Sorry about that. I’ll fix that
before I post the slides.
High glycemic diet that promotes insulin surges also promotes higher levels of blood sugar and higher
conversions of sugars to fat, and again, that fat makes estrogen. There is a vicious cycle in the arena of ovarian
cyst, which are quite common by the way even outside of PCOS. Because of this estrogen soup that we tend to
live in, we have problems where our diet can promote the formation of cyst, and then cystic ovaries tend to
overproduce estrogen, and higher estrogen impairs testosterone clearance, and so, the testosterone causes
more cyst and women can get stuck in a vicious cycle here where progesterone is hardly anywhere to be found,
but surplus levels of testosterone and estrogen are really being fed literally by our diet choices.
I want to show you just some simple examples of estrogen mimickers. I love using slides like this, again, as
visuals with my client, because it’s one thing to say, “Your personal hygiene products might be part of the
problem.” It’s another thing to show them a picture of something where they might think, “Oh, my gosh! I use
that.” It brings it closer to home, so a little pearl there. I really encourage you to use pictures, or props, sample
boxes, or packaging of products, but these are just some examples of really powerful estrogen mimickers.
One thing I’ll focus on is Triclosan, which is a preservative that is included in a huge number of personal hygiene
products. Pretty much anything that says antibacterial on it, like antibacterial soap or cleanser of some kind is
going to have Triclosan in it. Triclosan is also an ingredient in pretty much all of the major national brands of
toothpaste, Aim, Colgate, Crest, and obviously when you’re putting it in your mouth, you’ve got tissue that is
very, very good at absorbing chemicals there. Even if you don’t swallow it, you do absorb it through the tissue in
the mouth. Sunscreens are a huge source of endocrine disruptors. Great opportunity for people to look for more
natural products.
We talked about pesticides. Roundup is one of the worst perpetrators of that. BPA, most people are familiar
Bisphenol A and its present in the lining of metal cans in order to protect them from corrosion. It’s also on the
back of the vast majority of cash register receipts. It’s used as a lubricant in order to keep receipt tape from
sticking to itself and clogging a cash register. Unfortunately, if your hands are moist at all, when you pick up your
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receipt, and crumple it up, or fold it up and put it in your wallet, you’re getting BPA on your skin, which the
warmth moisture is going to help you to absorb nicely.
There are all sorts of examples about this and it’s a really wonderful way to really wake up your clients to
thinking about, “What am I putting not just in my mouth, but what am I putting on my skin?” I say all the time,
the skin is a giant mouth that does not have the benefit, unfortunately, of processing everything through the
liver before it goes to the tissue. In that sense, we’re actually more vulnerable to things we put on our skin even
than we eat. I encourage all the time to not put things on their skin that they wouldn’t be willing to eat, and
that’s certainly a big wake‐up call for how a lot of people think about household cleaners or personal hygiene
products.
I want to introduce you to a couple of websites that you may want to spend some time on that I would certainly
encourage you to pass them along to your clients. The Environmental Working Group is a non‐profit, non‐
government sponsored organization that exist in order to provide resources for people to understand the
toxicity or lack thereof of common choices. There’s a database for personal hygiene products, called Skin Deep,
and they also had a household cleaner guide where they rate thousands and thousands of different products
and share quite a bit about the various ingredients.
Discussions about estrogen dominance is a wonderful opportunity to get people using just very simple,
straightforward products. Bringing home that baking soda with vinegar is a really wonderful stain removal and
baking soda is a great toothpaste, and that sunscreens don’t have to be toxic. Moisturizers can have nothing in
them, but shea butter and a little lavender oil for nice scent. We don’t need to venture into all of these different
chemicals that are reeking not only toxic havoc, but creating hormone havoc in our bodies.
Now in terms of detoxification, I want to do a quick summary here. In the interest of time, you’ll have this page
to review at your leisure, but keep in mind that that the liver treats estrogen as a toxin, and so, during that luteal
phase, when the body has a desire to bring estrogen levels down rapidly. It can only do that if the liver is
effective at detoxifying estrogen and getting rid of it, otherwise, it stays in circulation and there’s not so much of
a fall‐off in the luteal phase and hence PMS gets pretty miserable.
In the liver, most detoxification of fat soluble toxins, which estrogen is, has two phases and this will just be a
brief review from what you remember from the disease course. The efficiency of both of these phases is highly
dependent on various nutrients that are required in order to make sure both phases take place. We’ve already
discussed in prior courses that if phase one is very effective and upregulated, we will not actually get rid of the
toxins and excrete them. What we will do is trap them in an intermediary state as free radicals that are capable
of doing quite a bit of additional tissue damage throughout the body, and so, it’s very important that phase one
and phase two are both upregulated equally in the body.
You can see things like B vitamins are extremely critical to good detoxification. Estrogen in particular is
detoxified in the body specifically using sulfation, glucuronidation, and methylation. Different toxins use
different process. In order to do these three things, the body has to have a good supply of amino acids. If you
have a middle age client who has all sorts of digestive disorders and is not digesting their protein very well,
they’re probably not going to have a good supply of amino acids in order to do good detoxification. If you have a
vegan client who is not making good food combining choices and is not getting a wide array of proteins in their
diets at all, they’re going to have impaired detoxification in the liver.
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This is a wonderful place to think about, “Is my client getting everything they need in order to support
detoxification?” because you have to have this conjugation in order to make sure that a toxin becomes water
soluble and that we can actually get rid of it. Specifically, for estrogen, the primary way is via our stool.
There’s a question about whether I will post this diagram and I will make that available. Happy to share that. I
think it’s a great suggestion. It’s actually another good picture to share with clients.
Detoxification can be impaired by, first of all, estrogen getting stuck in receptors. It may not even get to the liver
if we have low progesterone, again, that makes our estrogen receptors very strong and it makes it harder for
cells to shake off estrogen. Caffeine intake also upregulates estrogen receptors and can be one of the players in
estrogen dominance. It’s not about greater than zero caffeine, it’s about too much. Our research shows that the
tipping point for women is between one and two cups of coffee. Not giant mugs, but one or two cups of coffee,
so it’s not a matter of not having any. Some women find they’re very sensitive to it.
I have worked with a couple of clients over the years who found that they had fibrocystic breast, and if they just
completely cut caffeine out of their diet, the cyst went away entirely, because it allowed their receptors to relax.
Other women are not as vulnerable to caffeine, but it’s something to explore.
We talked about low B vitamins. If someone has a fatty liver, which is very common in Type 2 diabetes where
there are surplus sugars in the liver that the body has to store as fat. A fatty liver does not do anything
efficiently, including detoxify estrogen, so this is a place where diabetes can predispose people to estrogen
dominance and result in cancers. We’ve seen that in studies.
Low bile production. Gallstones and the gallbladder, or a missing gallbladder, can cause a problem with the
movement of that conjugated estrogen through the GI tract. I already mentioned the high levels of beta‐
glucuronidase. This is something that can actually be measured in a comprehensive stool test, so when you’re
checking out what else is going on in a person’s gut, a comprehensive stool test will tell you what beta‐
glucuronidase levels are and whether or not you need to help them to reduce them. Generally speaking, one of
the things that upregulates high beta‐glucuronidase is a high meat‐containing diet in someone who is
constipated, because the high exposure to the byproducts in meat is one of the thing that stimulates high levels
of beta‐glucuronidase.
I’ve also seen it be elevated in people who just have significant levels of dysbiosis. Yeast overgrowth like candida
or significant imbalance in beneficial microbes, so it’s something worth checking, because it’s a great example of
how the gut can very directly influence what’s happening with hormones. The nice thing about beta‐
glucuronidase is that you can reduce it by giving these individuals a supplement called Calcium‐D glucarate, and
I’ve got a couple of references there for you on this whole topic since it’s new to many people. It actually
deactivates beta‐glucuronidase. It changes it into a totally harmless molecule that is no longer an enzyme.
Very important to keep in mind that this is going to be effective not only for clearing excess estrogen, but by
definition, it’s also going to help to clear estrogen mimicking chemicals. When you have someone who has really
clear symptoms of estrogen dominance, you can very safely give them Calcium‐D glucarate without even
necessarily having a stool test. If you have the data, it’s nice to have a baseline, but it’s not necessary. It’s a very
safe supplement to use and the first reference I gave you there gives you quite a bit of information about it.
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And then, constipation, is a problem for a lot of things, because anything that is slowdown in taking out the
trash and hanging out in your colon longer is in danger of causing disease on the inside of the colon, and at some
point, it’s also going to be a trigger for reabsorption.
There’s a question about a suggested brand of Calcium‐D glucarate. The one I use most often is from Pure
Encapsulations. There are many brands, but I use that one most often. Pure Encapsulation is a great brand. If
you haven’t had your supplement class yet, we’re going to talk about various brands of supplements, and ones
that I prefer, and Pure is one that does not use any binders or fillers at all, so no danger of impairing absorption
or causing allergic reactions due to additives to supplements.
I’ve talked about excess estrogen. I’ve talked about not being able to get rid of estrogen. Now the third point
that I mentioned, that’s the third leg of the stool in estrogen dominance, is insufficient progesterone. We’ve
already talked about the role of chronic stress, but I want to point out some other ones that you may not be
familiar with. One of them is birth control pills and this might surprise you, because most people, when they
think of a birth control pill, they think, “Oh, I’m getting progesterone.”
The reality is that all commercial birth control pills include two hormones. They include more estrogen almost
always in the form of estradiol, which is a strong estrogen, and then a synthetic form of progesterone. It is not
bioidentical progesterone. In fact, it looks a little different from Gesterone and it’s one of many different
examples of synthetic progesterones, which are collectively called progestins, and a pearl for you is to realize
that, despite a whole bunch of pharmaceutical ads claiming the contrary, progesterone and progestin do not act
the same in the body.
In fact, The Women’s Health Initiative study has found, over decades of study, that the combination of the
estrogen and progestin in birth control pills and hormone replacement theory does create a significantly higher
risk of breast cancer, strokes, and heart disease in women of menstruating age. While a multi‐decade French
study of estrogen and bioidentical progesterone has actually found no negative side effects in terms of disease.
Certainly there are side effects if people just OD on progesterone.
Again, too much of a good thing is not better. Now, the primary symptom a woman might experience if she gets
it exuberant and takes too much progesterone, she will get very lethargic and foggy. That’s actually because you
can get so much progesterone that you displace Cortisol and you will make someone feel like they have adrenal
fatigue, but generally, that is a really rare issue. The challenge is the widespread of use this artificial
progesterones that are associated with all sorts of different complications and side effects.
Because of exposure to toxins, not only in our regular day‐to‐day life as adults, but also in utero, before we’re
born, exposure to toxins is believed to be one of the things that actually damages the ovarian follicles, even
prior to birth, that would later contribute to luteal insufficiency, which is simply the ovaries inability to produce
enough progesterone, so that we have luteal insufficiency. Just literally not enough output or anovulation, which
bypasses ovulation and therefore does not allow any progesterone secretion from the ovaries at all.
Menopause, again, contrary to popular belief, the hormone that hits rock bottom in menopause is not estrogen,
it is progesterone. Once someone is officially menopause, their ovaries are still making some estrogen, but they
are not making progesterone and we’ve become very dependent on the adrenal gland at that point. Keep in
mind that pre‐menopause is also a key factor here. You don’t have to wait till menopause to start to see a
reduction in progesterone and this blows people’s minds. From the age of 35 to 50, the average woman’s
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estrogen production from the ovaries only goes down by about 35%. Progesterone decreases 75% and will
rapidly fall off as she actually moves into real menopause, but there’s a huge discrepancy here. You can easily
see how during that long 15‐year period, women can start to have all sorts of hormone imbalance or dysfunction
symptoms, because it is much more likely that we become estrogen dominant. Not only because of all of these
external things I’ve described to you, but because of a literal gradual imbalance that is happening naturally in
our ovaries.
I have a protocol here for you for estrogen dominance support. Certainly in supporting my clients, I don’t always
do all of these things. I give you the opportunity to pick and choose from them based on what you think is the
lowest hanging fruit, but I think all of these make sense to you. I’m not going to talk through all of them because
they are mostly a repeat of things that I have described. I gave you some particular tips in terms of eliminating
constipation. If you haven’t had to benefit yet of the Disease Begins in the Gut 101 Course, you may not have
some tools in your toolbox yet for rapidly eliminating constipation.
A magnesium citrate as a supplement works fantastically. Magnesium stimulates peristalsis and movement of
stool in the intestines, and many women are constipated in the first place because they are deficient in
magnesium, which is one of the top three American deficiencies.
Estrogen detox support is really vital here and there are, thankfully, some really nice blends of the B vitamins,
and amino acids, and some of the key nutrients from cruciferous vegetables, and a number of different herbal
extracts that I listed below or key nutrients, that help to either swing enzyme balance in deference to more
progesterone and less estrogen, or that desensitize the receptors, or that help to upregulate phase one and
phase two.
In the interest of time, if you have questions about any of these, I’m happy to target them individually, but it’s a
collection of things that address all three of those issues, and it’s certainly much more economical and simpler
for your clients to use a blend of things rather than individual nutrients. For my clients who wrestled with this, I
will typically use metagenic estrofactors or a product made by ecoNugenics called “BreastDefend.” These are
not the only ones. There are a number of them and if you have questions about a particular brand, I’m happy for
you to post that on the course page and I’ll give you my opinion.
But high intake of cruciferous vegetables is really powerful for upregulating sulfation and of glucuronidation. I
give you the names down at the bottom of the page here of two really, really powerful chemicals that are in this
cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, and kale, and cauliflower, and brussel sprouts, that play a direct role in
upregulating phase two. If people are not going to engage in eating those vegetables routinely, you probably
want to make sure that the detox support supplement you choose has one or both of those chemicals in it.
Zinc is also critical for estrogen detoxification and it’s one of the most common nutrient deficiencies in
vegetarians and vegans, so I would recommend supplementing with maybe about 20 milligrams of zinc
picolinate or zinc citrate on a daily basis with food for your vegetarian or vegan clients. Especially vegans, just to
make sure they have enough zinc. The typical vegan diet is quite low in zinc and very high in copper, and zinc
and copper compete for absorption in the body.
And then, a few other points, iodine is something that I will encourage clients to consume most often in the
form of food. Things like kelp sprinkles, seaweed snacks, or using seaweed mixed in with salads, because it helps
to reduce estrogen receptivity in the sensors in the breast and is a fantastic clinical pearl for people who have
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had fibrocystic breast, and also nice if they have sluggish thyroid. You just want to be very cautious about giving
iodine in supplement form. Food is fine, but in supplement form to someone who has autoimmune thyroiditis.
Calcium D‐glucarate, I already mentioned. Bioidentical progesterone cream I am going to talk about in detail in
the second webinar, so I don’t really want you to focus on that now, because we’re going to talk about that at
length in terms of testing and how to use it in the second webinar. There are so many other things here to focus
on in terms of lower hanging fruit that may be very powerful addressing upstream factors before considering
actually giving someone some extra hormone. Although, general bioidentical progesterone cream is quite safe,
as long as it is used in physiologic doses.
The only problem I have seen in people who are using progesterone in the past, is they’re using off‐the‐wall
doses. Three, four, five times this which is definitely not safe. Chaste tree berry is effective in modulating other
hormones, like follicle‐stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone as a way of encouraging the ovaries to
produce more progesterone, and also being aware of alcohol consumption. Studies definitely show that is an
issue for moderate to more extreme alcohol intake for women. Not an issue with having a glass of red wine, not
on a once or twice a week for women who otherwise have a good metabolism and no blood sugar problems, but
definitely want to make sure that it stays mild.
There’s a question, “Would I use calcium D‐glucarate with active hormonal cancer?” Yes, absolutely.
Again, I’m a big believer in pictures. It can be really valuable to show clients pictures of the foods that you think
will serve them well.
Now, I’m going to finish up with just a few slides on some particular estrogen dominance challenges, but once
again, I would really encourage you to think less about micro‐analyzing, labeling what people are struggling with.
I remember one time I had a new client who’s I really felt like spend our entire health history trying to convince
me that she had premenstrual dysphoric disorder as opposed to just plain old premenstrual syndrome. It
doesn’t really matter. It’s just a name. Bottom line is she’s estrogen dominant and we need to focus on
solutions.
Let’s see. There’s a question about expanding, why do I have a concern about using a Iuterol with clients who
have autoimmune thyroiditis? Because usually, when people have autoimmune thyroiditis, even if it’s
Hashimoto’s which is autoimmune hyperthyroidism. Usually, what’s happening because of the fluctuating levels
of autoimmune antibodies, their levels of thyroid hormone are fluctuating all the time. Sometimes too high,
sometimes too low and using a very intense iodine supplement like Iuterol could actually exacerbate the hyper
thyroid swings. In particular, you would never want to give it to someone who has autoimmune
hyperthyroidism. That is Grave’s disease. There are some ways when you have autoimmune Hashimoto’s where
it’s very stable and they don’t have symptoms of swinging back and forth, who make the choice to use luterol
because they don’t want to eat seaweed, but I just really exercise caution with that because you don’t want to
exacerbate their autoimmune swings. But certainly, iodine via food would be fine, because it’s in much lower
doses.
I love the number of clients that are talking to me about PMS being shark week. If you haven’t seen these things
on the Internet, it’s really fun. I use this kind of thing for levity for my clients all the time. Someone discovered
that a diagram of a shark brain looked an awful lot like a vagina, the female reproductive organ system, and
there’s all sorts of comedy out there. I couldn’t resist sharing this one at the top of the page. It’s good fun in
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presentations and client communications, but there are a lot of women who struggle with extremely
symptomatic premenstrual periods, premenstrual weeks prior to the start of a new menstrual cycle.
Some of them are mild, some of them are extremely intense. Bottom line is it’s all about estrogen dominance.
Sometimes it’s more severe than others. Looks like I got a ‐Here. Sorry, it’s on this page. Just as a reminder, the
PMS window is this end of the menstrual cycle that we were talking about here. Now, sometimes people will
experience estrogen dominance throughout their whole entire cycle, but it’s certainly much more likely to
happen during the PMS window. There’s nothing magic about premenstrual dysphoric disorder. It’s just what
you would think of as extremely intense or severe PMS.
A clinical pearl for you is that those women usually need serotonin support and I gave you some thoughts here
on how to do that, because their pain perception is exacerbated by lack of serotonin. If women are struggling
with really severe PMS, they need your help with estrogen dominance. Now, our average client is certainly
eating a standard American diet or a typical American diet, and it’s important to remember that, when we eat a
diet that causes a lot of insulin surging, it is one of the things that promotes our ovaries to make more
testosterone.
When we eat a high glycemic diet or easily digested carbohydrates, they could still be organic, they can still be
additive‐free, but too much fruit juice and too much GABA is still going to cause huge insulin problems. We’d like
to have a good lower glycemic response, but certainly, the average American’s experience in their meals and
snacks is what you’re seeing in the left‐hand side. When you get this much insulin surging, the area under this
curve, it modulates sex hormones in a giant way.
When we are secreting a lot of insulin, we are promoting fat storage in the body and this is important to realize
that this is regardless of weight. We have a phenomenon in our society now that I call “skinny fat girls” where
they may be of a perfectly normal weight, or even underweight, but body fat as a percentage of their body mass
is way too high and it’s creating this epidemic of muffin‐tops that we see in young girls who are maybe just 2 or
3 years into their menses. But high glycemic diets promote high insulin, insulin promotes high testosterone, and
excess insulin promotes body fat, and body fat makes estrogen.
Practice that dynamic so that you can explain it well, because you’re going to see it a lot and that combination of
high testosterone and high estrogen, or estrogen dominance, is what we see happening in polycystic ovarian
syndrome that is rapidly becoming epidemic and is a primary reason for infertility in young women, because
most women who have PCOS do not ovulate. If you don’t ovulate, remember, you don’t make progesterone in
your ovaries, and if you don’t ovulate, you cannot carry a child. You cannot conceive a child.
I’ll let you read through this. It’s really a repeat of what I just described, but keep in mind that there’s a real
double whammy here where not only do you have the testosterone and the estrogen dynamic that causes the
PCOS itself, but in the absence of ovulation and thus low progesterone, it is really setting these women up
eventually for a much higher risk of cancer.
Unfortunately, the typical, conventional physician or endocrinologist’s response to this is to just give women a
birth control pill, which in my opinion is a disaster area, because long‐term, while that may give them a little
relief in the short‐term, in terms of addressing things like heavy bleeding or mid‐cycle pain, especially if it’s
acute. Remember that progestins and birth control pills do not have the same effects as bioidentical
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progesterone, and longer term, they’re still going to suffer from the effects of estrogen dominance. You’re
undoubtedly going to see this in your practice if you haven’t already.
It’s a unique combination of things, but these women just still need help with estrogen dominance, and in
particular, help with their diet since that’s part of the key trigger with regard to the testosterone. So, I hope you
were feeling much more comfortable now with what are hormones, how do they affect us, what can go wrong,
what’s the rich variety of things that I can very directly help someone with? It’s not complicated. I can very
directly help some with in terms of changing their lives in order to slowly unwind and reverse estrogen
dominance.
As always, I’ve given you a number of different resources for more information here, some for you, some for
your clients that you might want to consider as tools in communicating or further understanding some of these
dynamics. And then, in our next webinar, I’m going to be focusing on perimenopause and menopause, and
hormone testing, and hormone supplementation, and as always, I’ll also be talking about a couple of specific
case studies from my client files to help you pull it all together.
Please do make time in your schedule to review this webinar at least one more time, preferably twice, but
within the next ten days in order to lock in your learning so that you’ll be ready to bring on additional data in the
second webinar. I really encourage you to go ahead and block a couple of hours in your calendar now for that
purpose since it can be so hard for us as busy people to find time on the fly, but I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself
in this webinar and I appreciate that for this topic in particular, you may be feeling a little overwhelmed.
That’s okay, be gentle with yourself. Please make full use of the online Q&A tool within this course, and as
always, I will be posting the streaming video, the PDF file of the slides, and the downloadable audio file by
tomorrow, and I will also begin to post handouts. Be sure to check back to the course page every few days
because I’ll be adding another handout every few days in building that as we go. I thank you so much for your
participation and I wish you a good evening. Take care. Bye‐bye.
The End