Hormones Balanced But Still Exhausted?

Many of you last time may have for the first time heard about the concept of holistic hormonal health. More than just hormone replacement, more than just hormone optimization, but looking at sex hormones, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, then pregnenolone, your memory hormone, DHEA, and all the other hormones related to sex and sex function for both males and women, looking at holistically. The idea is taking a deeper dive and looking at things because you are an integrated individual. You are more than just the sum of your parts. And understanding that can be super helpful, especially when you're still having issues with libido, brain fog, hair loss, skin being dried, painful intercourse, decreased libido, and all the other symptoms that can be associated with low hormones or those sex hormones. I want to come back around to the idea of looking at this holistically from a holistic perspective, because many people aren't familiar with that concept. I want to take a to look at. And we talked last time about some of the parts of this. And when I go back to the idea of toxins, things that affect your hormonal health, because it's not just toxins in your food and your water and your air, it's not just toxins that you eat, it's also toxins that, that come to you from your environment. This includes mold, biotoxins, and includes pesticides, chemicals, detergents, cleaners, things in your house. A lot of people don't realize that Many of these are considered neuroendocrine disruptors. There are chemicals that affect the nervous system's impact on your, your hormonal system, your endocrine system. And that includes all hormones, not just the sex hormones, but also thyroid, cortisol, insulin, and all the other— leptin and ghrelin, all these other hormones your body has and their impact. But the idea is that these environmental factors can have a massive impact on that. So if your hormones still don't feel balanced and you've done replacement, done the optimization, the intoxicants is the first thing in the holistic world to start thinking about. Now, this idea of these things being there is actually an old idea. Bisphenol A, that many people are familiar with, actually was originally developed as an estrogen. It's a type of synthetic estrogen to be an estrogen-like compound. It was actually beaten out by DES, or diethylstrobesterol. Some of you may have heard that. That was a compound used to treat morning sickness in women in the '50s and '60s, ended up causing horrible, horrible birth defects, was removed from the market. So very powerful estrogen-like compound. But the reality is that the BPA actually— it beat out— BPA was created to do something like that. Some very smart German chemists and scientists decided if they polymerized it, hooked these things together, they could turn it into a plastic-like material that then you could put inside tin cans, food packaging, etc. So I mean, You hear about bisphenol A and you're not sure what to deal with it. This is the deal with it. But it's one example of the thousands of chemicals. Many women that I see in my clinic will not realize that their personal care products, many of these are petroleum-based, synthetic, the skin moisturizers, the really nice skin stuff you put on that, that silky smooth feeling. And a lot of those things are actually phthalates. So all of a sudden, looking at your hormonal health holistically, looking at things that are toxic to your system, realizing that things you put in your house The little plugins you might have in your house that give you a nice smell in your house, right? Those are actually really bad for your neuroendocrine health. And so some people who develop after tick bites, tick-borne illnesses, after concussions will actually develop sensitivities to those and develop chemical sensitivities. You can't smell certain things. You walk down the aisle at the grocery store, the cleaning aisle, and all of a sudden you feel kind of weird and dizzy and lightheaded and zappy and just feel awful from that chemical exposure. These are affecting the neuroendocrine neurohormonal axis. And so all of a sudden, cleaning your environment up, starting to clean out all these things from your house. Removing those burning candles as well as those little incense things you put in. Um, clean up your own personal care products, removing fabric softeners. Fabric softeners are the ones that affect my patients a whole lot. And something people don't realize, how many people use fabric softeners just to make their stuff soft and smell nice, right? Those are synthetic chemicals that can affect your neuroendocrine, neurohormonal axis and be an intoxicant or an adulterant to how your hormones work in your body. Sugar is something else that people don't think about how it impacts your hormones. Sugar is very inflammatory. It drives yeast growth in your GI tract as well as strep. And one of the things about that is that affects your body's ability to detoxify estrogen and hormones and other metabolites from your liver to your bowel, out your, out of your colon. So if you're consuming large amounts of sugar, yes, you get the sugar high. Yes, you feel better for the 3 to 4 hours, but then you have the crash. But bigger picture, it can be a type of intoxicant that will impact how your hormones work, whether you're not needing hormone replacement, hormone optimization, or if you're taking it and you feel like it's just not working as well for you. Now, another thing to think about is also medications. A lot of us don't realize that drugs are actually mitochondrial toxicants. They affect your gut microbiome, and many of them also act— have this neuroendocrine brain hormone, brain-body, brain-gut axis, and they disrupt that. So when you think about hormones from a holistic perspective, you have to think about that. Now, what makes us more susceptible to this? Nutrient deficiencies, both macro and micro. Protein's gotten— has come to light recently, mainly because the FDA changed the food pyramid around, put protein at the top very first, because we humans tend to read from the top down and from the left to right. And because a big old ribeye is right there, we're focusing on the fact that, oh my gosh, meat's such a big deal. But if you look at the whole entire thing, you see it's mainly plants, meats a small part of that. But the point is that the reason that was put there is because many Americans don't get adequate protein in our diets. A healthy individual should get 1.5 to 1 gram per kilogram body weight just for like survival. Like if you're just existing, if you're physically active, you're an athlete, maybe 1.5, depending on how physically active, maybe 2 grams per kilogram. To put things in perspective, I'm releasing Arnold Schwarzenegger. Um, talk about his bodybuilding program. He was eating 1 gram per pound. So he was like 240 to 220, 240. He was eating 220, 240 grams of protein a day. So a lot. So that's, that's a range of like professional bodybuilders and survival. Then most of us are somewhere in the middle, but the reality is most of us were getting 40, 50 grams a day. And when you realize that you have to get adequate protein to make amino acids, to make neurotransmitters, our neurotransmitters come from amino acids. Um, a lot of our thyroid actually tryptophan comes from amino acid. We need these amino acids for gut lining protein production, hormone production, all these things. And if you're deficient, not getting adequate protein, all of a sudden you're not gonna make your internal hormones, internal regulators, as well as you should. The other thing to keep in mind is because of the toxic environment, our needs for protein are increased. Phase 2 detoxification is just our body trying to remove toxins, but it requires glutathione, glycine, cysteine, taurine, a whole bunch of amino acids to help with detoxification. And if you're toxic overloaded and protein insufficient diet, all of a sudden you're not going to detoxify as well. So all of a sudden these nutrients are part of this holistic view of hormonal health. Um, basic vitamins, vitamin D, they're fat-soluble vitamins. These are important for controlling inflammation. Trace minerals. One of the things that's come to light recently is our need for rare earth minerals, trace minerals. Fulvic and humic acid become very popular because they are a source for some of these rare earth minerals. Nutrient status is one of these holistic blind spots that we have that we don't realize is a super important thing for hormonal health. And the last one I want to briefly take a little deeper dive into is the idea of having pacers. You know, recently it's, it's come to light that, hey, how much sunlight you get exposed to is a big deal. You know, the lights I'm using right now for this podcast are also— I'm getting overloaded with blue lights. Actually, after, after a day of this kind of stuff, I'm really fatigued and tired. I need to get outside in the sun. Why? Because these are messing with my body's natural circadian rhythms. Well, guess what? Daylight cycles— you make more testosterone, sex hormones in the morning, you get a bump in your thyroid and your cortisol in the morning. You want these to come down at night. If you're flipping that by exposing yourself to tons of blue lights in the evening and afternoon, all of a sudden it will impact your neurohormonal gastro-neural endocrine hormonal system. All of a sudden the nervous system's connection with all this gets messed up because of light exposure. There's other pacers as well. The Earth actually creates electromagnetic fields that pulse. The Schumann force pulses at about 7.83 Hz, which just happens to correlate with our alpha brainwave activity. And then the, the flux, which is an electromagnetic resonance created by magma going into the Earth's core, uh, crust, right? Well, it resonates 0.4, 0.7 Hz, which just happens to correlate with the coherence of our heart rate when we breathe in and breathe out. Roughly, you're having about 10 to 12 of these episodes every minute, which is about how often you breathe, which also reflects in your heart rate variability. Point being is that we have these natural pacers built in just living on this planet that impact our nervous system and our heart's conductive system between the two of those. And that gets disrupted by external electromagnetic fields. For those of you who are hearing this, think this is kind of weird. We are using electromagnetic field devices now, rTMS, to treat brain issues, cardiovascular issues. We have been using electrical stimulation devices for years to help with bone healing repair. So the idea of these things having an impact on our psychology our brain health as well as our hormonal health is not a new concept. It's just not commonly used in medicine. Point being is external smog, electrosmog, can impact that. So all of a sudden, you know, how much time you got outside in nature? Um, how do you not expose yourself to EMF when you're sleeping at night? You know, do you wear some type of glasses to protect your eyes from the blue lights when you're going to bed at night? Do you remove— something that most of us don't do— do you remove technology, blue lights away from you 2 hours before going to bed. Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Anxious Generation, actually talks about this in relationship to anxiety in kids and their exposure to technology, which has lots of blue light, and having it before bedtime causing disruption in their sleep-wake cycles, which affects their mental health and their feeling of safety and security, resulting in anxiety, right? So this is not— these concepts are not unheard of. It's just in the setting of it affects your hormones as well. All these things, as well as hormones. So the point was, if you're working with someone with your hormones, you need to have all these things in mind. If you're doing hormone replacement and you're doing the optimization and still not feeling like your hormones are doing what they're supposed to do, think more holistically, reach out a little bigger, and start looking at these other factors. And we'll try to give you some more tidbits about how you can deal with that as well in some future podcasts. Take care. We'll talk to you soon.