85: The Healing Power of Estrogen: Why Everything You’ve Been Told Is Wrong with Dr. Devaki Lindsey Berkson

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Hello and welcome.

I'm Dr. Jen Simmons, a breast cancer surgeon turned integrative oncologist on a groundbreaking mission to transform the conversation around breast health. If you're seeking to redefine the way that you think about breast health, you're in the right place. Breast health isn't just an aspect of well being. It is health, integral and indispensable. Here on the Keeping Abreast podcast, we delve deep into the innovative ways to diagnose, treat, screen for, and prevent breast cancer. But it's more than that. It's about having the crucial conversations that empower, enlighten, and drive us all to a healthier place. As someone who has navigated the front lines of breast cancer treatment and now champions an integrative approach, I bring a unique perspective to these discussions with blending rigorous science with holistic health principles. Health is a journey, not a destination, and I am truly honored to accompany you on this path. Each episode aims to provide you with actionable insights and cutting edge strategies to take charge of your breast health and your overall well being. So whether you're here to learn about the latest in medical advancements or seeking tips on lifestyle changes that foster real health, they the Keeping Abreast podcast is your go to resource. Let's embark on this journey together, because when we talk health, every conversation matters. And now, stay tuned for this week's episode.

All right, if you're here today, hold on tight. Hold on tight to your seat because you are going to be blown away. I cannot tell you how excited I have been to have my guest today. I have been thinking about it, dreaming about it, and I am most excited for you because you are going to have the benefit of spending the next hour or so with a distinguished hormone scholar, probably the person that knows more than anyone else on this topic, who is absolutely responsible for shifting the way that we think about hormones, the way that we use hormones. And she is not only that, but she is a shining example of how to do it. So we're going to talk about how she does it. We're going to talk about all things hormones, including things that disrupt your hormones. So this is going to be something that you do not want to miss. Let me welcome Dr. Lindsay Berksen. Dr. Berkson, I can't even begin to read your bio, so I'm not going to. I'm just going to say that before we got on this call, we were talking about the fact that you do all these things and you mentioned your age. I'm not going to share It.

You can share it if you want to share it.

You look exactly like me. So whatever you're doing is so amazing, and you're doing it so well that I just want you to share with everyone. So, Dr. Bergson, welcome.

Oh, you're so kind and so erudite. You're just such a lovely speaker. I am excited to be here with you because I kind of think of us as kindred spirits.

For sure. I. I couldn't agree more. I mean, in fact, the first time we met, which I don't know if it had an impression on you, but it definitely had an impression on me. And I just felt this energy run through my entire body because I knew that there was some collective force that was just meant to bring us together. And recently, someone. I was having a conversation with someone, or maybe I was recording on a podcast, but they said, have you spoken to Dr. Bergson? Because I feel like the two of you speak the same language, and you. You would be really great together. And I said, I've been trying to reach out to her for ages and I haven't been able to connect. And do you know that that day you sent me a text. Did I ever tell you this story?

No. This goes to. My ovaries are quivering in excitement here.

That day, that very day, when someone said, you should be connected with Dr. Bergsten, and I said, I've been reaching out to her, and I didn't get a response. You texted me that day. It was truly crazy.

Universal synchronicity. Yes.

Without question. Without question. So, I mean, your bio is too long to listen. You've written too many books for me to even start to talk about them, but you are a. A distinguished hormone scholar. I mean, you truly are. And you have spent your career being a truth seeker and being a truth teller in a space which got very, very murky in 2003. Very murky. So I would really like you to start to talk about why estrogen, which we, for decades before that, touted as the holy grail, and then it underwent a total derailment, as you refer to it. So can you first talk to us about estrogen? Talk to us about the importance of estrogen. And I know that we shouldn't be using that catch all term. Right, because we have a lot of estrogens, but.

Right. And then there's a lot of activity on the social media about estrogen dominance, making estrogen sound like the villain with a nasty little handlebar mustache. Right? So.

Yes.

Right.

Okay. So let's have a tell all let's have a tell.

All right.

What is estrogen? What is it doing? Why is it important? And why do you think people are trying to make it the villain?

That is the question of all times. Because what's not taught in med school, it's human to be down on what you're not up on. And the majority of the physicians that you go to, whether they're naturopathic medical doctors, whether they're osteopaths or chiropractors, they have no longer been taught of the benefit of hormones and they've mainly heard about the harm of hormones and they don't know anything about testing and tracking. So when well intentioned patients inquire of well intentioned doctors if estrogen might be for them, 99% of the time we're getting the wrong answers from a well intentioned human being. So let's kind of break it down. Why did estrogen get so many of our bad intentions and vilified so badly? So the first thing that's important to understand and that it's not taught in med schools are that hormones are the most powerful signaling molecules we have in the body. They can go into the our archival library where all of our information from our parents, grandparents, great grandparents, to guide our tissues what to do. And they can tell move genes around for genes to tell tissues what to do. So whatever can dip into your archival genetic information and get those signals told to tissues is the most important hormonal player that we have. You can think of hormones as running the Internet system of the body and it runs the WI fi and hormones send messages, you've got mail and what is disease and aging? But it's the freezing up of hormonal email. That's why aging, everyone fears aging. Everyone fears to look older, everyone does. Almost nobody wants to be frail or have cognitive decline or joint pain and lack of mobility. We want motion and movement and so on. But we go to a joint doctor for painful joints. We go to a gastroenterologist for upset with our gut or imaging on a regular basis. We go to gerontologists. If we're looking like we're forgetting some words. We go to a pulmonologist to look at our lungs, but all those tissues are lined with hormones that allow the WI fi of those local tissues to work. But the way we've compartmentalized medicine because it's so massive, and we have these different genres of board certifications of medicine, but they are not taught about hormones because we think of hormones as being relegated to the urologists the gynecologists and the endocrinologists. Those are the people who are supposed to be in charge of our hormones. So David Brownstein and I just recently put on 16 hours of continuing medical education credit for medical doctors and nurse practitioners. And we got about 270 physicians from seven countries, many of them OB GYNs and urologists. And they would say to us, up until now, I've hardly known anything about hormones. I wasn't sure how to test them, how to treat them, how to write a script for them. This is the first time that I feel comfortable with hormones. And Halle Berry's trying to. A bipartisan government trying to raise money to get doctors to teach hormones in med schools because everybody knows that they've not been taught in med schools. And she shared with Congress just a number of months ago that a 2023 survey of gynecologists showed that less than 31% of them had ever taken even one course on hormones. They mainly know about handing a script out for birth control pills. Yes, for synthetic hormones.

So.

And in fact. So anyway, so there is this lack of appreciation of the molecules that drive the wifi of all of these tissues, not just reproductive and sexy tissues. And my big question to everyone is, why would Mother Nature make the very hormone that drives evolution in humanity be pro carcinogenic? It makes sense.

It makes no sense at all. And, you know, I think it's more than a lack of appreciation. I think it's a complete ignorance. And I, I don't mean that in the, in the negative sense that it's coming off. But you started by saying that people are going to their gynecologist, they're going to the urologist for hormone information. And the truth is that urologists are surgeons, gynecologists are surgeons. These people are not being trained on hormones. The, the extent to which gynecologists understand hormones is they were taught to prescribe birth control pills for menstrual abnormalities and maybe progesterone for menstrual abnormalities at, at the other end of the spectrum. And I don't know what, if any, training urologists get, but I can tell you that by and large, what those, what those specialties are trained to do is operate. Those are surgical specialties. They are not trained on the nuances of hormones, and they are certainly not trained to manage anyone with any individuality. No one. It's a standard one size fits all, if it happens at all. And it's always, always, always non bioidentical because they don't learn, they don't learn about it. There's no opportunity. Unless they are specifically seeking that information, which is exceptional. Unless they're specifically seeking that information, it is not given to them, it is not part of their curriculum.

But the sad part is, is that hormones aren't just about reproductive things and perimenopause and menopause or abnormalities of menstrual cycles. Hormones deliver these emails that make everything work. And they signal to satellite dishes waiting for their emails. And we have satellite dishes throughout our heart, our brain, our kidneys, our digestive tract. And now we've discovered that there's non genomic signaling of every single hormone, which means they also signal to every single cell membrane in the body, because non genomic hormones signal to cell membranes, which are global. So we are discovering that hormonal health dictates health of local tissues, heart tissue, brain tissue, kidney tissue, digestive tissue. We're having incredible results using this information, helping people with inflammatory bowel disease by shortening their flares and even making on follow up imaging, colonoscopic follow up imaging to show that it looks like they never had a disease. Because we know hormones signal those tissues so we can use them along with other as an adjunct of care. So hormones work in the reproductive system, the sexy system, but they also work throughout the entire body. And nowhere do we benefit from this kind of knowledge because medicine's been compartmentalized. It's really a conundrum.

It is, it is a conundrum. And you are exactly right about the fragmentation of medicine. And so the cardiologist isn't thinking about what the endocrinologist is doing. And the endocrinologist is not thinking about what the orthopedic surgeon is doing, who is not thinking about what the gastroenterologist is doing, which, who is not thinking about what anyone is doing. Right. And so what ends up happening is we have all of these specialists telling everyone else to stay in their lane and no one is thinking about the person in their totality sitting in front of them. No one is thinking about the patient from a holistic view. And so people are suffering and they're suffering terribly, and they're suffering a lot of iatrogenic suffering because when you look at the body in that fragmented way, you end up falling into a hole of polypharmacy. And this.

I was, I was just invited to speak at the Arizona Naturopathic Convention in November and I was speaking with the president, Zan Simonson, and she said, you know, because of the women's Health Initiative. We stopped teaching hormonal therapies in Naturopathic School 20 years ago. So she said now that my colleagues, because she's older, she's a colleague of mine, have retired. There are almost no naturopathic docs, except for a few remaining older ones that believe in hormones. So when patients even go to a naturopath who should be the best of all natural medicines and hormone replacement therapy is a natural medicine. So it's very hard to know who to go to because of this training lag and then all of the other vilification of estrogen, besides the fragmented confusion, it's almost. If you step back and women have been so downtrodden on this planet for so long, for so many generations, you almost have to wonder if this misunderstanding or misrepresentation or putting. And women are all talking about estrogen dominance, they themselves have taken on this mantle and say estrogen is bad because they have been taught when it's really all hormones can signal so many different ways. They're very, very, very promiscuous. But I don't know if you've gone through your audience about how estrogen got vilified and how it's not vilified and this and that, but I know you and I have been talking about, you know, giving courses for providers where they don't get so frightened to write scripts for high risk women. Like a woman who has had a hormonally driven cancer, like a breast cancer.

Yeah. But both physicians and patients alike have been conditioned to think of estrogen as bad. So why don't you start to talk about where, where do you think that comes from? Do you think it's solely the Women's Health Initiative? Because I think, I think it's a lot of the Women's Health Initiative and I would love for you to talk about what, what the major problems were with that study. But I also think that it is for the benefit of, of the breast cancer population in order to sell anti estrogen drugs.

So you think it's money driven?

I do. I think this is a narrative created by the pharmaceutical industry to serve their purpose.

Well, that's really interesting. Just as an adjunctive, before we dive into the root cause of estrogen vilification. You know, when I wrote Safe Hormone Smart Women, which was a response to the Women's Health Initiative, so it was published in 2010 and the Women's Ill Fated First Women's Health Initiative came out in July of 2002. At that point in time, there were about a hundred articles Taking a look at the preoperative level of progesterone in a woman's blood and then tracking women who went in for any breast cancer procedure, like if she had breast cancer and she wanted to remove her implants, if she was having a mastectomy, if she was having a lumpectomy, if she was having a lymphadenectomy, they would go in and track those women with compared cohorts, women who are similar, have similar tumor sizes, et cetera, and track these women for a number of years. Many of these studies went on for 20 plus years. And what were they measuring? They were measuring preoperative, preoperative levels of progesterone, which is a, a police hormone for estrogen. And they found that women who got their surgeries in their luteal phase, the middle when, when you make more progesterone, or if they had progesterone levels above 4 nanograms per milliliter, which is about it could be anywhere from that to 16 nanograms per milliliter is the average higher level of progesterone mid cycle. Those women had less recurrence, less death if they did have recurrence. So much so that reevaluations of these studies show that 29% reduced mortality. If you had more progesterone in your bloodstream when you went in for surgery, why isn't this standard of care? So there were about a hundred articles when I wrote Safe Hormones, Smart Women. So it was a replicated. And that's the holy grail of science is it replicated by independent laboratories? And it was higher levels of progesterone before you go in for any breast cancer surgery gives you much safer outcomes for your future. But what they did, all of a sudden, most of that data on PubMed disappeared. I couldn't even believe it. You know, I've been looking in the data for years. About two hours every morning I wake up, have a cup of coffee and dive into the data. And I've been doing this for almost 50 years because I just turned 76. And you know, you start looking at trends in the literature and, and the thing that got me was suddenly a group of researchers in India said it's so clear cut, the progesterone gives you if you have more progesterone in your bloodstream and you go in for almost any cancer surgery, let alone breast cancer surgery. So they started promoting an injection of synthetic progestin. And then suddenly all the other studies showing higher levels of natural progesterone disappeared to promote the use of a pharmaceutical. And now it's very hard to find a lot of those studies that I used in my book Safe Hormone Smart Women. So to get to your point, money drives even what is represented in PubMed, which is our NIH consortium of all the abstracts of peer review literature.

Well, I mean, you know, that's true because it is so easy to prove a narrative that is like part of it. Like it's easy to find articles on estrogen causes breast cancer. Right. But when you look for the articles that go against that, you have to dig so, so deep. I mean, there have been times when it has taken me, and I am an educated researcher and it has taken me hours to find what I'm looking for. And it's because it's buried and it's buried on purpose because most people will give up. Most people are not true to us.

We do not give up.

We do not give up.

So I had breast cancer 33 years ago and I was a DES daughter where most of the daughters who got exposed to that drug given to pregnant women that used to be thought it was a good drug, but in 1971 it was banned as the most cancer causing drug. But they gave it to lots of pregnant women. From 1938 to 1971 it was given to 38 million women. And those daughters mostly got breast cancer if they were exposed early on in pregnancy, the first trimester between the ages of 44 and 46, which is exactly when I got breast cancer. And I wanted to, I had so many organs removed from so many things that happened to me from the DES exposure. I wanted to be on hormones. I was invested on knowing if it was safe for me with an ER positive breast cancer, could I be on hormones? So that became the holy grail of my research. And now I've been on hormones for almost 30 years with an ER positive breast cancer. And I know that many of my sisters, I refer to all women as my sisters. But if you've had cancer and I've had cancer now, you know, twice, if I don't want them to miss out because it makes such a difference in how you age. It really does. And you, it's crazy that we want to turn off estrogen completely to save a woman from a recurrence of breast cancer, but then we're exposing her to heart disease, to lung disease, to kidney disease, to bone fractures, you know, she. You sacrifice your life to try and save your life. It's a little bit crazy, but one of the things that I've done Recently, and we gave this as a bonus material in our Everything hormones was just like you were talking about spending hours in the literature. I sleuthed out 26 studies, mostly published before the first Women's Health initiative that turned us all awry, that looked at ER positive breast cancer patients and gave them estrogen right at the time of diagnosis and tracked them with a comparison cohort. And one of the first ones was from MD Anderson. And they looked at 319 women for three years, and they found women on hormones did better with less recurrences. And then there was another study that was from Fred Hutchinson Research Cancer center, and they looked at women for many. Let's see how many years. I want to blow this up here. Some of these studies looked at women for almost 20 years. In their study, they found that women who had breast cancer, ER positive, that went on HRT, had much better outcomes. They looked at 2,500 women, and with. They found that women on hormones after they were diagnosed with cancer did better. They did better. It's crazy, and we're not told. That study looked at. Excuse me, that study looked at 174 women and followed them for 19 years. One of the other studies here, they followed women for 26 years. There's 26 studies from the University of Wisconsin, the University of Georgia, Maryland, Anderson, Fred Hutchinson Research Cancer Center. They gave ER positive breast cancer patients in an era where we thought hormones were good because the WHI wasn't published yet. And when they tracked them, they had less recurrence, they did well, they had less death if they did have recurrence, which, by the way, is exactly the same thing for men. Abraham Morgenthaler, the retired associate urology professional from Harvard, he and I have lectured together, and he says exactly the same thing for men with prostate cancer and testosterone. But we're focusing today on women, and nobody mentions these studies. And these studies are not even that easy to find anymore. But these studies were done by very prestigious institutions. They track comparison arms, which is another way if you're doing a prospective study, and there's not one study in a time when it was ethical to give ER positive breast cancer patients estrogen where they found worse outcomes. And I just unearthed another study from Swedish researchers that I published in my Agile thinking substack this morning where they say, we know that progesterone higher levels before surgery reduce your death rate. So what about estrogen? If estrogen's so bad, what about blood levels of estrogen before a woman goes in for breast cancer surgery? So these Swedish researchers measured estradiol levels in women that were going in for breast cancer operations of a variety of kind, and they tracked them over time. And the women that had the best prognosis, the least recurrence, the least death, if they did have recurrence, were the women that had the highest level of estradiol in their bloodstream. Preoperative levels. So how could it be that estrogen. Everyone's saying estrogen dominance, estrogen dominance, like it's a bad thing. But estrogens in all hormones are extremely convoluted. And estriol signals, anti cancer, anti inflammatory receptors and cell membranes, we've got a lot of protective tissue action from estrogen. And I really question us putting a bullseye on estrogen's back and saying it's always fuel for breast cancer cells. And I think we might look back 30 years from now and believe this was the dark ages of endocrinologic medicine. And that identifying ER positive PR positive markers on breast cancer cells, which I worked with, Tulane, with Elwood Jensen, who was credited with starting this breast profiling and won the coveted Lasker Award for it. And he and his. That's a long story. He was a wonderful, wonderful gentleman. He just died recently. I think we're going to look back on this time and think that's not what the ER positive, PR positive meant, because every single cell in a healthy breast has ER positive PR positive, HER2 neu positive, all cells have that. So it's. We're going to look back on this time and feel like we, we had hoods over our head with no slits for our eyes and we couldn't see where the medicine was going.

I think we're going to be horrified, actually.

Yeah, I think we're.

I think we're going to be horrified and I think that we are going to be remembered as a very cruel and ignorant generation of medicine. I really do.

Well, there was just an article that came out in Medscape, which of course is very conservative because it's supported by so many pharmaceutical companies. And the gentleman said, how could we still be leaning on the whi? The same authors of that study reanalyzed it and said that estrogen was breast protective, not the opposite, unless you added in a synthetic progestin. But then they went on to say estrogen is so important to prevent cognitive decline, heart attacks, bone loss, et cetera, even renal kidney health. You have hormone receptors all over your kidneys. So it will become insidious. It's insidious that we, withhold hormones. That's what this Medscape article said. And that we shouldn't even give it to a woman 80 or 90. Why not? Why shouldn't we ever. So here's Medscape saying there's no estrogen window. You can be on hormones and initiate them at any age. And it's insidious and evil to withhold hormones. And I think that will be. But I don't know how many of us that are practicing now will be alive then to see this dawning of the age of revolution, of estrogen appreciation and vindication.

Yeah. Although I think that people like you and I, we. We intend to be the change that we want to see in the world. Right. And I know you and I are committed to reaching as many practitioners as we can and try to. I'm not going to say try. We are going to impact major change. Major change. Because it has to happen. I wonder why physicians are so quick to accept vilifying estrogen and so reluctant to accept that estrogen is not the enemy, it is actually the hormone of life. Why do you think that that is the case?

I think there's two things that drive a lot of things going on in the United States. And I love being an American. And my father fought in the trenches for four years in World War II and another two years in the infantry in the trenches in the Korean War. So I really care about being an American. But I really think things are driven by money, as we just said, and number two, litigious activity. My dad was a lawyer. And I hate to say this, and I love a lot of people that are lawyers, and when you need a lawyer, you need a lawyer. But when the first Women's Health Initiative erroneously said it looked like estrogen caused the very things we were giving it to women for to prevent breast cancer and heart disease. What happened was the minute a woman had been put on hormones and got breast cancer or a clot or a myocardial infarct heart attack, doctors got sued. And the first few doctors that got sued got sued big and bad and quickly. And it comes down to litiginous fear. And then that makes standard of care. Standard of care is really based on. You could sue the doctors that aren't doing standard of care. And that made everybody fearful. So money drives part of the train. And the fear, the understandable, realistic isness of the litiginous society we live in drove the other. So I think. And then that fear then reverberated in the cells of the doctors and people are Just too frightened of it. And then on top of that, they stop teaching hormones in med schools, nature medic schools, osteopathic schools. So, one, you have money driving Big pharma and the insurance industrial complex. It's not just big Pharma. And then you've got the litiginous deal and fear of losing your licensure, and then they stop teaching it. Well, all of those force vectors came together to make doctors biased against estrogen and women took on that mantle of bias and now women, and nobody really understands the benefit of hormones. We've succeeded in vilifying estrogen and I hope today we can vindicate her a bit by some of the things that we talk about.

Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you that a lot of this is born out of litigation activity. And a lot of that, A lot of the basis for that litigitous activity was that there were hormones being prescribed in formulations that you and I don't necessarily agree with and in methods by methods that you and I don't agree with. So can you talk a little bit about what is the difference? What are you talking about when you're talking about bioidentical hormones? What is the difference? Because they're all synthetic, right? These are all made in a lab at this point. But there is a big, vast blue ocean between the bioidentical hormones that we talk about and what is generally being prescribed by people who are not trained and not literate in hormones.

I mean, that became one of the lessons of the ill fated Women's Health Initiative. Ultimately, everyone who reads the reanalyses, there have been about 15 reanalyses of that. My book, Safe Hormone, Smart Women was a reanalysis of it, and pretty much it was the synthetic progestins that was driving the breast cancer. In fact, one of the largest studies we have is the French 3NH study. I always forget all those little letters, but they looked at almost 80, 90,000 women and looked to see what hormones they were on. And they showed that natural progesterone either has no effect or a protective effect on the breast, whereas synthetic progestins are what drive carcinogenic change. Or like in birth control pills, they give, they're made up synthetic progestins, but they also lower testosterone. And the male maleness protects femaleness and having healthy levels of testosterone also protects your breast. So it's all become so confused. So let's first unconfuse bioidentical versus synthetic. All hormones are made in the lab, but bioidentical hormones are made to be the exact molecular copy of your own hormones that your body is used to. If your body's already seen this molecular structure, the exact molecular structure, it won't have adverse issues. And the reason we're all mesmerized, supposedly, with these large randomized trials is that they were based on the drug industry we're creating for patentability. We want to get a molecule that's never been seen in nature. Your body's never seen this molecule. And that molecule we can patent. We can't as easily patent the estrogen or progesterone that your own body makes. So they would also.

We can patent a molecule of nature. Right. You. You cannot patent a molecule of nature. You can only patent something that is not naturally found.

Right, exactly. So synthetic medications in the United States started to make synthetic drugs like the most common estrogen prescribed for many, many years, was one of the main estrogens they used in the Women's Health Initiative. And it was a combo job called Prempro. And it was made up of horse, pregnant mare, horse estrogen, a conjugated equine estrogen, and mixed together with medroxyprogesterone acetate, a synthetic progestin. Whereas in Europe, they mostly use estradiol, natural form that's bioidentical, or estriol, which is another form of estrogen, but bioidentical. They mostly use natural hormones in Europe. So when they saw our Women's Health Initiative, they go, why are those Americans getting so crazed over two little randomized trials? And they all use synthetic hormones. Why don't they use natural hormones like we do? So you need large, large studies to see how the human body might react to a molecule. And that's been made, that's never been seen by the human body before, but with bioidentical hormones. The body has seen these hormones and worked with them before. But our medical schools and our associations like acog, that runs all of our. That educates all of our OB GYNs, they're all very, very supported financially by these big pharma in Chicago, the North American Menopause Society, which kind of trickles down their guidelines to gynecologists of how to treat women. They're opening slides where we're here with alliance, alliance allies with Pfizer Moderna. It was just the list of all the pharmaceutical companies. And those were their opening slides in September in Chicago at their annual meeting. In fact, I took pictures. Some of my friends were at that meeting. They took pictures of those slides. And I Started opening up some of my talks recently. Sewing this is what the doctors are being educated because these associations again, you know, you said the first driving force is money, that, that they're being supported by that. So bioidentical versus not is the exact shape. Even though it's made in the laboratory, it's still the exact shape and versus a chemical that's been altered. So some bodies will react to it this way and other bodies will react to it this way. You don't exactly know because it's an altered molecule, which is kind of the basic idea to make profits for your shareholders in big pharma, you've got to have a product that nobody else can copy and you hold the multiple, multiple patents on. And that's another thing where it's gotten to be kind of dangerous in medicine is this big arm of these money making. You know, you take these beautiful minds that are very smart, know how to take tests and go through all this training and then they go to med school and they learn how to pass out meds to be the middleman for these big pharma rather than they don't have the time to take a deep dive into the patient in front of them and look for root cause and really talk with them and then try and figure out how their physiology went astray so that you can make their terrain more whole and happy again. And that's not how medicine is taught. We're not teaching thinkers, we're taking teaching drug dispensers. It's so sad.

It's true. I say that all the time. If you have a provider, and you know, doctors aren't the only ones that are guilty of this, There, there are a lot of providers that fall under this same teaching paradigm. So if you have a provider that you see for an issue and all they do is write you a script and they don't talk to you about your diet, they don't talk to you about your sleep, they don't talk to you about your movement, they don't talk to you about the toxins that are in, on and around you. They're not talking to you about how your life is going, how your relationships are, you know, whether what, what kind of pressures you're under right now. If all you get from your doctor or, or provider is a prescription, you don't have a provider, you have a drug dealer. And we, I can tell you with 100% certainty as someone who came through this very conventional medical training and had the great privilege of being able to experience life as a Patient and gain this perspective that I have gained. But I can tell you, if all you do is walk down that conventional role, Critical thought is not welcome in this space. It is not welcome. No one wants to be questioned along the way. And we are very much trained to accept, without questioning what is being taught to us in medical school and in residency. And if you are someone that asks questions and, and, and is thinking outside of the box, you are very much isolated. You're considered a troublemaker, you're a quack.

You're.

You're whatever title that they can put on you to, to discredit you. Right, because they do not want anyone disrupting the status quo. And that is true throughout your career. I mean, when I left surgery, everyone who I, who I was a colleague of before, when, you know, last week, I was, I was the trusted expert in the room, and suddenly I'm a quack. I lost my skills, I lost my mind. I, you know, whatever they could say to discredit me, none of which was true. I mean, I left surgery completely voluntarily because I knew that that wasn't the answer. I knew that cutting out the tumor wasn't the answer. And I am not criticizing people who do surgery. I'm not criticizing people who opt for surgery. Please know that that's not what I'm saying. I am saying that I wanted to make a major impact, and I knew that I was not making a major impact either for the person in front of me or for the millions of women that I actually wanted to help by cutting out tumors one by one. Because when you do that, you're not addressing any part of what is going wrong with their physiology. All you're doing is taking them from one bad place to another. But you're not impacting the rest of their life in any kind of positive way. Right? You're not changing the trajectory that they're on. You're just taking them over a bridge. Right? It's just another crutch.

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So I do still think that the the mode of delivery becomes important and the one of the major reasons why we are vilifying estrogen is because the pharmaceutical companies have come up with estrogen blockade.

And I think it's really sad that so many women who have podcasts and Facebook groups, they're taking this on too, because everyone wants to be so. When I was young and growing up and the Beatles were coming back from India from the Maharishi and we were thinking this was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. And we wanted to all go out and serve the world. We wanted to figure out how to, how to help humanity and drop out and drop in was the kind of watchword. And now everyone wants to be an influencer. That's the deal. They want to be an entrepreneur, they want to be an influencer, they want to make a gajillion dollars before they're 35 and then travel the world. And they don't really care about America or countries or any boundaries. You know, they're kind of far away from those wars and things that, that we've had that were major, although, and, and people are, are very different and they're having these podcasts scaring just as estrogen's getting vindicated. Just. So what happened was we had several statisticians at the NIH say, wait a second, let's take a look. We have Medcare, we have millions and millions of older women in Medicare. Let's look at all their medical records and let's see how much they, how long they live. Let's see how their bones do. Let's see if they get neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease. Let's check it out. So they started out with the 7 million study of looking at 7 million Medicare ladies 65 and older. And then by the time it was went through peer review was a 2 year almost peer review process. I'm on a few peer reviews for certain medical journals myself and it usually takes two, three weeks. I'm expected to give my response and send it back in two, three weeks. This took almost two years because hormones are such a hot topic. And it was finally published last year in April and it was now called the 10 Million Study where they got 10 million American women and they looked to see who was on estrogen. And just what the heck did this estrogen do to our older women who were all saying are no longer candidates for hormone replacement, they missed their estrogen window. We frightened everybody of this. And what they discovered is women on estrogen therapies and they could have opposing progesterone or whatever, but they were mainly looking at women who were on estrogen. And most women who had a uterus were on some form of progesterone with it to prevent getting uterine cancer. Women on estrogen lived 19% longer than women not on estrogen. Women on estrogen had statistically less of three cancers, very strong statistical significance, breast, colorectal and lung. And then there were several other cancers that didn't meet statistical significance, but they had statistic, they had statistical Trends. So the 7 million studies said it protected against 5 cancers, and the 10 million studies said it protected against 10. When they added 10 million women that they were looking at all their medical records, you had less cognitive decline unless you took oral estrogen and you'd use synthetic progestins. And they looked at it at every which way. And they even discovered women who had heart disease high. There were 31 papers they cited for this. Women who had heart disease like afib, congestive heart failure. You had a number of stents put in. You know, most of our population, really, those women on hormones did so much better, died less, lived longer, fared better. Except for diabetics. The. The research was a little bit obtuse for that, so they didn't have clear correlations with that. But the ultimate story was hormones were vindicated last April. And this is why we're having this conversation, because suddenly it really. Everyone started to recognize that the Women's Health initiative was reanalyzed by the original authors. And they said women on hormone therapy estrogen for at least five years have 23% less breast cancer. And if they do get breast cancer, they die from it 44% less. Nothing's ever been shown. In fact, one of the things we know, if you go on hormone therapy and you go on to get breast cancer, some of these women have sued their doctors for this actuality, you're in better. You're in a better scenario because you're more likely to have a better playing tumor and die from it less because the hormones were improving you. So we learned last April, hormones are vindicated, Estrogen is good. Our largest group, the National Institute of health, looked at 10 million American women, the largest hormone study ever done, and showed the safety and efficacy of. And now all of a sudden, because hormones are starting to make their way, there's women on Facebook and women on social media and ob GYN saying, oh, yeah, but. But you shouldn't do this. And you should do this, and you should be very fearful of taking oral progesterone. You can get dementia from that. And there comes the fear again. And because so many people want to be an expert and an influencer, they want to be the one person that they think understands this. And you should follow me and listen to me. And then when I write my next book, I'll have a really amazing amount of sales. It's so hard to figure out what is the real science or how much is the ego Getting in the way again of the story of estrogen as a good player, not a bad player. So that's my thoughts on. I think a lot of ego is promoting estrogen fear so that they can look like they're the, the top of the estrogen divas.

Yeah, it's so, so, so true. There is a study that gets brought up time and time again that is still in support of estrogen, is not safe for women who have had a history of breast cancer, and that's the habit study. So can you talk about the habit study? Because I can't tell you, every time I talk about hormone safety and the breast cancer population, I have someone come at me about the habit study.

So I went into these studies in depth in Safe Hormone Smart Women, which, by the way, when the original authors of the Women's Health Initiative, which was a group of 40 institutions that got together saying, hey, our country is aging. We don't want to topple Medicare. Let's look at how we take care of women. And so we had hormone studies, we had cholesterol studies, we had bone studies. The Women Health Initiative had many, many different studies. And so my book, Safe Hormone Smart Women, was trying to vindicate the wrong conclusions of one of the early hormone studies, of the massive number of studies that made up the bulk of the Women's Health Initiative. And people look at the habit study, but if so, my history is that I don't take anyone's word for it. I go back to the study and read the belly of the study, the statistics of the study, how the methodology, the discussion. Oftentimes the abstract doesn't even match what the study really says. You've got to really dive into it. That happens. People do this all the time.

All the time.

So the habit study, the women who got breast cancer, more that were. So this was breast cancer patients that were given hormones were the women who were on estrogen blockers so the estrogen couldn't benefit them. So if you look at the subset of that study, the women who had the increased incidence of breast cancer while on estrogen never got the benefit of estrogen because they were the subset on estrogen blockers like amoxifen or aromatase inhibitors, et cetera.

Yes. And it's astounding.

But nobody says that. Nobody. No one talks about that. Right, Right.

No one talks about that. And when people.

You have to be a nerd. But it. But women miss out is the deal.

I know, I know. And it just hurts. So this is an area that you and I are concentrating on, and I want to get more into it. So the main fear around hormones, undeniably, because I think most, most people can buy into that. There is cardiac benefit, there is neurocognitive benefit, there are sexual benefits, there's mood benefits, there's joint benefits. But the, the lingering fear is in and around breast cancer. And even if you find someone to prescribe for you, if you are someone who had breast cancer, all, all bets are off, you are cut off. And, and women have a near impossible task of finding a provider who will write them for hormones after a breast cancer diagnosis. Some people who just have a strong family history can't get providers to write them for hormone replacement. But the, certainly the women who have had a history of breast cancer, they are being absolutely, positively cut off from the system. What is this about and how can we help these ladies?

Well, this is the promotion that estrogen fuels breast cancer. And if we really believe this, if you end up being a triple negative patient where you don't have any receptors for estrogen, progesterone or HER2NEU on your tumors, why shouldn't you get hormone replacement? But you're lumped into, you've had breast cancer, you can't have it. And then we have the exquisite work of Dr. Rebecca Glasser and her colleague, Dr. Demetra Kakis. And I'm never sure if I really pronounce that last name correctly or not. So if Dr. Demetra Kakis is listening, I apologize for my Mrs. Malapropping you that term. But she did exhaustive work on testosterone and has shown that if you give testosterone with an estrogen blocker to women right at time of diagnosis, she's even treated some women who've denied all standard of care treatment and shown improvement and published some of those case reports. And we invited her to be part of everything hormones. But she said, Dr. Glasser said to us, I believe that estrogen drives breast cancer and recurrence. And I said, can you send me a study? And let me send you the 26 studies that I have found where they literally tested giving estrogen to breast cancer patients with matched cohorts. That means women with similar age, similar tumor size. Match cohort means women with similar characteristics. And they found that estrogen consistently gives breast cancer patients better outcome. The conclusion of every single one of those studies was let's not deny women that have breast cancer giving them hormones. And I said, can you please read these and can we have a discussion? And that was it. I didn't hear anything back from Dr. Glasser, I hope I get another conversation with her. I just gave an all day course in Ohio and her best friend who's a hormone doctor came and took that course and she told me that she would go and try and get Rebecca to talk to me. So I was gonna try and call her up again and see if we can open this discussion. But people truly believe that the estrogen receptor on a tumor means that estrogen fuels that cancer. And that's why everyone is frightened. And then the Harvard study that I think was very damaging came out last year and they saw that estrogen was very close to the DNA adduct issue, you know, where DNA is getting damaged and they claimed estrogen was driving it. But I loved having that conversation that you and I had with your brilliant concept that estrogen is really coming to the area to help heal it and serve it. Because we know that estrogen modulates our entire immune system. In Covid women got Covid highly anti inflammatory.

It's anti inflammatory and it's actually healing exactly right. It's a repair hormone.

It is, it is, but it's not thought of in that way. It's thought of as a cancer, it's erroneously thought of as a cancer promoting hormone. And you know, hormones aren't simplistic. They are not simplistic. And we have. Estrogen is the oldest hormone on the planet. And it's. Michael Baker was my consultant, he's a PhD in hormones from the University of California and he writes all the estrogen sections in medical school books. And we, my, my mentor, Tulane got us together and he was saying, listen, estrogen is so complex that in the jawfish, the lamprey jawfish, where it was first identified, all they had was the receptor, the satellite dish to receive it. But there was no estrogen because it was such a complex hormone. It was the first hormone on planet Earth. The first. And it has more receptors than more places. It can deliver its wifi emails than any other hormone. And it's completely misunderstood, but it's very complex because every diverse receptor it signals has diverse actions. So estrogen is not just a villain. Estrogen is a center stage actress that has many talents on her resume and many ways in that she oversees emails that keep diverse tissues safe. So you and I have to try and help get providers to understand this and then patients that want to use those providers so they don't miss out. Because everyone says to me, you know, now that I'm going to be 77 and you know, I've had a very horrible History with, With the def. Exposure in utero. And I've battled cancers and many health issues and blindness. I mean, my. Now in my older age, getting my hormones truly balanced, I have the youth I could not enjoy in my younger age. And people always say, what is it that you do? Tell me everything that you do. I want to know what you do. I mean, people follow me around with their phones, wanting to, you know, listen to everything, but foundationally, I do many things. In fact, there's almost nothing I don't do. But the most important thing I do is really having balanced hormones.

So I. I want to hear about. First of all, I think everyone wants to know what you do. I know you say you do everything, but can you. Can you give us some idea and like, give a, Give us a list that, that most of our mortal colleagues, not superstars like you, not superheroes like you, but. But other us mere mortals, what can we do?

What is. What is.

What is a little bit of everything that we can do so that we can get on the path to, to looking like you and feeling like you because you have more energy than most of the 17 year olds that I know.

And I only have one adrenal gland because when I had the kidney tumor that even though the surgeon promised me he'd leave the adrenal gland in and it was totally healthy, he did not, because it was more time. Right. That he had. He had to tease apart all those arteries and things. And he didn't want to do that because he wasn't going to be paid any extra money for it, even though he promised me he would leave it in. So I'm getting all these things on one adrenal gland. Yeah.

Which is just.

And I'm just a raisin by now.

But. But it, but it is a testament to what hormone balance looks like.

Even with one adrenal gland, which we now know is. It doesn't pick up the. The slack of the other adrenal gland like supposedly a renal, you know, nephrectomy does.

Yes.

Removing. So anyway, okay, so the first thing. And when you do hormones, you can't, first of all, you can't just ask your regular doctor to run hormones and do hormones for you, because as Dr. Simmons has been very beautifully stating, hormone replacement is nuanced. And you need someone who is trained in it. So you need someone who knows what to look for in your blood and whatever else you do, because it isn't just. You can't just run a Dutch test and totally tell you what hormones to do based on that. Because there's things you also have to run in your blood. And hormones are promiscuous. They signal a lot into a binding pocket, which is malleable and large. It looks like a purse made of fine buttery Italian leather that you can jam in your makeup bag and your purse and your huge airbrush and you can expand it because these are the messages or the wi fi signals of life. So your hormones, initially the first genomic kind we know, signal into these what they're called binding pocket domains. They're pockets, they're wide open, which is why pollutants in the atmosphere, like endocrine disruptors, heavy metals, forever chemicals, plastics, they can get in on these pockets. And then when your hormone is close by, it can't get in because you're like if you go to a bathroom on an airplane and someone's in there, it says occupied. If your receptor is occupied, hormones can't get in. So just measuring levels of hormones isn't the total picture because you could have perfect levels of hormones, but you have occupied receptors. So you know, it's. Your hormones are foundational, but they, they require detox. So detox has to be. I have been detoxing since I've been in my 20s because I was a lived in India, was a yoga teacher for many years and got into, I go out to the desert, gather my own chaparral leaves, dry them, do hy enemas with chaparral. I have been detoxing one way or another and I had no idea that was laying foundation for me to be healthier because I had such horrific genetic exposure in the womb from that drug that my mother was given. And all hormones, because of this pocket thing, they're promiscuous and they each can settle on into each other. So you have to make sure all your hormones work well. What's your insulin levels when you wake up in the morning and after meals? What are your thyroid levels? All your hormones are a family that can function and dysfunction together. So if your thyroid isn't stabilized, you might go to a well intentioned doctor to get onto estrogen. But every time you get it, you don't feel anything or it makes you feel worse because your hormone functionality isn't optimal. So understanding hormone basics is all your hormones need to be assessed. And then in the binding pocket domain, that's where nutrition comes into play. You've got zinc that pulls the hormone into the binding pocket. It's called a zinc finger moiety, but it's two atoms of zinc and as we age, many of us can't hold on to enough zinc, even from our food or supplements. You need iodine, you need vitamin a, you need B6, you need magnesium, you need pyridoxyl 5 phosphate. The activated form of B6 dictates the optimal duration of how long a hormone sits in that pocket and shimmies and delivers its Wi fi email. So nutrition is a critical part. So I've been eating organically since I was 17 and heard a lecture by Scott Nearing that the body's the temple, you are what you eat. You ought to eat organic. And I went, makes sense to me. I don't think if I would have been doing detoxing and eating organically and always being physical, I've always exercised. My mother was state champion in Illinois, number one in the state for tennis and number one in the state for fencing. Whoa. So I was raised in a home where if I'm lying on the couch too long or gain five pounds, my mother's hitting me in the butt and telling me to, you know, know.

So I was, off you go.

Yes. So I was raised by a woman who exercises because people are always asking me how much I have so much. Why do I have so much discipline? I don't think it was due to me. It was the isness. Kids are the mirrors of their parents.

You have an atomic habit, right?

Right.

You have an atomic habit. I love that.

I love that.

You might not have chosen it, but that's what you got from your childhood. You got an atomic habit, which is amazing.

I love that. Hadn't looked at it like that. So that's foundational. But you know, I've been into Nutri the minute I heard Dr. Bernard Jensen at the Hidden Valley Health Ranch when I was about 21 years old and I studied ayurvedic medicine when I was at just graduated college at 19, went to India and studied it there. I was always looking at natural answers once I realized that that was going to be a healthier approach to things. And so I was detoxing, eating healthy foods, exercising. And now today I go to the gym almost every single day. Everyone who knows me know this is true. I haven't moved from this house because my favorite gym is a mile away and there's a spring fed quarry lake behind it so I can work out and go swimming right afterward. And I started a woman's kayaking club here. This weekend I'll kayak 10 miles, mostly with women 20 and 30 years younger than me because women my age can't bend down and get into the kayak. A lot of them I don't. So I've been, I moved to Austin to kayak. I've been kayaking for 24 years, but now I've started a woman's kayaking club and we kayak four and a half miles and often two to three times a week or this week we will do it that often and we go all winter long. So there's not a lot of people who do that. I think you need to push your physiology. What I learned from having had cancer twice and working with a lot of cancer patients is that you have to train for your recovery like you're training for an ironman. The fitter you are, the better your outcome for everything. Even your longevity seeking. So to push your cardiorespiratory fitness where you're just don't even know if you could go any further but on a regular basis gets everything more elastic, everything more yogic, open and expand. So that's kind of been my.

You have to stress yourself to do it.

Right.

Right. Because if you're not pushing yourself, you're never going to have growth. That's true of everything.

Everything. So a lot of women say when I ask women, what do you do for exercise? Almost everybody says I walk. And it's not that walking isn't good. Okay, well let's put on some, some lead chest. Let's put on some 1 to 2 pound weights on your wrists and your ankles. Let's stretch that walking, because walking isn't enough. Because you need muscle mass and for muscle mass you need all your hormones. One of the issues with aging is you work out like you always did, but you're not building any muscle. I don't know if you can see my muscle here, which is sarcopenic and muscle releases enzymes that care take your eyes and your brain that are like robo cleaners. They look for bad proteins. Muscles are the bomb. But to do that you need hormones and digestion and healthy nutrients that help the hormones work and detox, that allow the hormones to get into a binding pocket domain. And then you need to push yourself, push yourself. Whatever you enjoy. You've got to be on a regular basis pushing yourself if you want to push back the aging clock.

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. I want to touch on something that you started to talk about because you started to talk about endocrine disruptors and why, why they are disrupting your hormone system because they are literally sitting on your receptors. I did a, I did a post this week on Instagram. I think it's so amazing that I think you said in the beginning, you're down on it because you're not up on it. The criticism that I got the most was from nurses who, who think that this is urban legend that think that endocrine disruptors aren't a thing. Because my post was about using hand sanitizers. And. And then when the pushback I got was that, well, I'm a nurse and I don't have a choice. I have to use hand sanitizers. I'm taking care of patients all day. And I said, well, I am a surgeon. I did, I did take care of patients all day and I never use hand sanitizer. Never.

So what do you use?

Soap and water. And also, I'm not a crazy hand washing person. I've never been a crazy hand washing person. Because I think in many instances, we really do need to educate our immune system. So we need to get a little dirty. We need to expose ourself to some germs in order for our immune system to develop. It's this.

I'm on the dating app still, so I've met some of those germs. Yes. I'm still dating at almost 77. Oh, God. I've got to keep my nutrition stable. Yeah, I don't know if it's. God bless me. That's because my nose is in the peer review literature all the time.

But I mean.

So they honestly believe endocrine disruption is a urban legend? Urban fantasy.

Yes. Yes.

Oh, my God. Okay.

And part of that, part of that, you know, I'm asked all the time, well, where's the science on that? I want articles.

I. I think they actually ask for that.

Oh, yeah. I think a lot of people on Instagram think that I'm their research assistant.

Like, oh, yeah, I get the same.

Thing sitting around all the time.

Oh, let, let me just, let me.

Just grab you the research on that. And, and they really, they're. They're, they're down on what they're not up on. And they think that this is urban legend and that things like phthalates and fragrance and antibiotics and xenobiotics.

I hate to say this. Oh, God. Should I say this? I don't know if I should say this. They're idiots. I mean, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. So the reason I got invited to be a distinguished hormone scholar at the center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane, which closed down its doors a few years ago right before the pandemic is because I'd written this book called Hormone Deception which was there were no one knew about endocrine disruption. It was totally unknown. The first receptor by Elwood Jensen wasn't even discovered till 1986 in the second estrogen receptor, 1996. So hormones as a field wasn't even really happening until the 1990s. And then people started, started noticing in the wild that in polluted lakes, animals, male alligators in Lake Apopka in Florida were observed by Lou Gillette, who was a integrative biologist at the University of Southern Florida. He saw that male alligators and polluted lakes were developing eggs and getting feminized. And he had to catch these alligators, put them on surfboards, bungee cord them in there and start doing, you know, on site biologic incisions. And he found eggs in male alligators and female alligators were starting to develop penises. It was from his observations, Lou Gillette and Theo Coburn who was noticing in wildlife, they're the canaries in the mind that exposure to chemicals was gender bending our wildlife and also making them have aberrant behavior, like aberrant mating behavior, aberrant parenting behavior. So no one ever knew about endocrine disruption until these scientists first started noticing it in the wild and noticing a decrease in fertility of species. That's the big bugaboo is when you can't replicate. And so in a three month period we're three major books came out that alerted the public to endocrine disruption, which means chemicals in our environment that can get into these binding pocket domains. And even though we've got great hormone levels, not let hormones signal because like on an airplane toilet, it's occupied. So three books came out. Theo Cockburn, Our Stolen Future, my book Hormone Deception and Hormonal Chaos. Those books came out in the three month period in the year 2000 and that started everything. And my book has a thousand citations in the peer reviewed literature. This is not small. And now many countries are saying that our obesity epidemic, our metabolic crisis, a lot of this is being driven by chemicals from plastics to forever chemicals, but nobody knows exactly what to do about it. In 2017, some of my cronies at Tulane got together with the Huffington Post and Harvard and they gave a huge online forum saying the three major issues facing humanity right now are nuclear crisis, no one wants that. Global warming, there's a lot of debate about that. And the third one was infertility rising because of endocrine disruption and endocrine disruption threatening Homo sapiens Parenting behavior to obesity because endocrine disruptors make your fat cells act nastier. We know this from Bliss Blumberg at the University of California in Irvine. He showed that if you're exposed and it was just one endocrine disruptor to a pregnant mouse, the next four generations are obese, even if you fast them just from one exposure on a chemical, tributalin, that was normally painted on the bottom of ships but has now been removed, but it's still in the waters because you can't permanently remove it. And that was only one chemical. So there is so much data to completely support the risk of endocrine disruptors because they're blocking the WI fi of humanity's bodies. These messages that send signals to your tissues that can get into your archival library and tell your tissues what to do to keep you the best version version of yourself. They're being attacked by chemicals in our water, air, and food, and we don't quite know what to do about it. Shanna Swan has been one of the big, big people. She's in her 90s now. She's a biologist that's been reporting on the increase in infertility and poor sperm motility, sperm counts, et cetera. Now, we know that plastics are in semen, in sperm, in placenta. Amniotic fluids of healthy young American women have two to 300 chemicals, many of them endocrine disruptors. This is a real deal. We just don't know what to do about it. So whoever says there's no whatever, I hate to say it. I don't mean to say there are idiots. I don't. But it gets so exasperating to do such hard work, to see such a massive legacy of research and have people just because they don't know it. Exactly what you said. You're down on what you're not up on. And then their patients don't benefit.

No, no, definitely not so. And we undeniably are in a time that is unlike any other. I mean, it is absolutely unprecedented. We are not living on our grandmother's Earth. We are not even living on our mother's earth. And the Earth that we are living on now is exponentially more toxic. And I never like to present a problem without offering a solution. So what is a person to do? How do we minimize our exposure to these endocrine disruptors so that we can optimize our hormonal health?

So you asked many of the things that I do, and I've been doing all these things for years. So the last 3 3rd of this book is how to reduce exposure. Because you need to know how to reduce exposure, but without going crazy. If you could just make one change a month, like you get most of your exposure in your shower if it's unfiltered in the morning. Most water treatment plants, I mean all water treatment plants, they cannot remove metabolites of birth control pills, of bioidentical hormones of pharmaceuticals, and also organic chemicals that interact with chlorine, that make trihalomethanes that are cancer producing chemicals. So just. And then you stand under the water for five minutes and your pores are opening and you're taking this in, just getting a shower filter every six months. And I go through steps like this, proven steps with science behind it, because many scientists have been looking at all of these things. When I interviewed scientists for this book, I said, how do you reduce your exposure to endocrine disruptor? And the most common, common response of all the scientists was never microwave food and plastic. So if you have a plastic tray, even on an organic food product that you purchased, or a plastic cup, and never reuse plastic containers even though they're washed in the dishwasher. One of the biggest brew. Ha ha. When I was a distinguished scholar at the CBR at Tulane, I can't remember the name right now of the PhD that discovered this, but she took a plastic container that had been washed in a dishwasher with regular detergent. If you wash with green detergent, this doesn't happen. You gotta be using green products.

Yeah.

So she took a plastic container that had been washed in a regular dishwasher with regular dish soap and put water in it and fed this to animals. And all the next generations became infertile from the microplastics that went, from the scratching that you can't see from the regular detergent in the dishwasher. So everybody said, don't reuse plastic containers for food or beverage. Try and. But it's very difficult in America to buy mayonnaise in glass, ketchup in glass, mustard in glass. It's hard to even find these things.

I know you really have to try, but.

But there are steps of my. My book goes through the basic steps that you can do. But you gotta eat organic as much as you can. You gotta take your shoes off at the front door. But you really gotta detox. Cause you can't completely live in a Seinfeldian bubble like the bubble boy on Seinfeld. You know you're gonna get chemicals in you. So you gotta figure out a way of getting Chemicals out of you. And there's many detoxes to do. And I've been detoxing all my life, as I said, from the start of my life as a yoga teacher. But because I worked at Tulane and I realized that these binding pockets have to be available for a hormone to settle in, I've designed with Bionic Scientific a receptor detox product and a hormone balance and protect product, because I want to keep taking hormones. Oh, you've got those products right there. Yay. Yay. So I literally designed these products based on working at Tulane with the scientists who discovered receptors. And based on their help, I made it easier to detox. Like you could do receptor detox four or twice a day on Saturday and Sunday. Need organic and you're getting a significant detox. Or you take two of each twice a day on a full stomach because there's full flush niacin in here. So you might get a little teeny bit of flushing for a little bit, but you want to flush because niacin helps break apart your fat cells where a lot of these chemicals are stored. But the bigger deal about hormone balance and protect is that I helped design the first line of female products for medical for physicians with metagenics in 1982 when Med. When Jeff Katke left his old company and went to his new company, he had me design the female line. And I learned a lot from designing the femline. And this is my next generation. So this product helps tamp down cancer stem cells where recurrence. Recurrence and cancers really come from and really helps architecture of all glandular tissue. So that is. And it took me years of refining for the formula to create this. So I'm pretty proud of these products. And I don't want to make this too much an infomercial here, but detoxing on a regular basis, you should do at least one detox a month of some kind, Even if it's for one day where you do my receptor detox four twice a day or you do something else. You just do a green juice fast and go to the gym and sweat and sweat and sweat with your workout and maybe do a sauna or something. You should make detox part of your lifestyle. And I think we're such a dirty planet that if we really had our medical and insurance system together, we would have medically reimbursed insurance, reimbursed detox centers for women before they get pregnant, ideally for green pregnancies. I've been champing for years now. The concept of green pregnancies it started out in New Zealand with some people that said, I wonder if people detox before they get pregnant, if you'll have less ADHD and autistic kids born to those people. And they were starting to gather data that showed that they were insinuated they were correct, but then Covid happened and they weren't able to finish their statistics. But it makes a lot of sense. If you read my book Hormone Deception, you see how the amniotic fluid and chemicals can affect the future of your child. So if you can pick your mate or pick your eggs or whatever you're going to do, because now birthing is done in so many different ways. And detox, get yourself clean. Because mother's milk, which is fabulous, it downloads all the pollutants a mother's had in her lifetime, 80% of her own pollutants into her baby. Doesn't mean you shouldn't breastfeed, but you should detox before you get pregnant and then you're breastfeeding. So there's so many things to do. And I think that the really intelligent people of the future will detox before they get pregnant. And detox needs to become part of your life. One time a year, do a week detox, another time, do a weekend detox. Sometimes, you know, I take receptor detox 2 twice a day on a regular basis because 24, 7 you're exposed to these chemicals. So just like you need a multi one a day, you need a one a day of detoxing this stuff out of you because we're exposed 24, 7. So any detox you can do as many as you can do varieties of them, simple to complex, they're the ways. Because you got to get this dirty stuff out of you so that your wifi system doesn't freeze, putting you more at risk of disease and premature aging.

Yeah, I agree with you. And I think one of the major problems, and it's such a symptom of our society, is that no one seeks health until they lack health. And so we're not thinking as a society, oh, I want to optimize my chances of getting pregnant. I want to optimize my health for my pregnancy. Because everyone assumes you're young, you're healthy, and it's not until they have problems with fertility and this is becoming more and more an issue and more and more common. And it's not until they have problems with fertility that they even seek help. And they're seeking help from fertility doctors who are doing nothing more than forcing a pregnancy. They're not, they're not working with women on detox. They're not working with them on diet. They're not working with them on health optimization. They're working with them to force a pregnancy. So we're not solving the problem, we're actually compounding the problem. And then those issues that we have with our youth are only getting more and more prevalent and we're seeing more and more autism and more and more adhd. And it's because we are toxic. We are toxic. And we're not teaching people the solutions during the time that they need them. And most people don't even. You know, if you, if you're someone who went through IVF and you had a successful pregnancy, that's kind of the end of your journey. You don't, you don't seek health afterwards because you think that, you know, you got, you achieved your goal. So it's, it's, it's really a shame.

And it's a sad point.

It is, it is. And it's because of what we value and what we reward in our current medical system. Because we don't have a healthcare system. We have a sick care system. Right.

That's kind of like my story. Most people, like you're saying, don't get into functional medicine until they're ill. They get a diagnosis of cancer and suddenly the next day you're looking at what you eat, what you know, what doctor can I talk to about my terrain and why even got cancer in the first place? But I was somebody that heard that lecture from Scott Nearing. When I was 17, I began to eat organically. I was a fan of the Beatles. So I went to India and studied Ayurveda and was then met Dr. Bernard Jensen, was detoxing, eating organically. And then I started getting cancers. Then I started getting ill. So I started realizing it wasn't just the way that you live, but it was also your exposures that your mother was going through during her pregnancy and her amniotic fluid and her egg and my father's sperm, that all of this played a role in how the genes played out as you became an adult. So I got into epigenetics through my own life, realizing that health is so multifactorial. It's how we live, but it's how our parents lived and their parents lived. And we really give the legacy of our cellular physiology, not just our money and our exposures.

Yes, you are exactly right. But I think we can all agree that you are exceptional and the exception to the rule more than more than the rule. And most people are not seeing their mother's exposures as opportunities to correct it in this generation and beyond.

So but the problem is, is that so DES was the most powerful synthetic estrogen ever invented. Fifteen times more powerful than our regular estrogen, our 17 beta estradiol. And we know now that those people born to those women that took DES in the first trimester, they have issues in their tissues and they really battled a lot of stuff all their lifetime, from obesity to cancer, et cetera. But the average American woman has about 30 to 300 chemicals in her amniotic fluid. The spoon is filled, filled with plastics. We've got forever chemicals. We are just walking. So the synergy and additivity between all of those chemicals means that we are birthing generations that are similar to the DES offspring. We just haven't quite identified it as that. And I think part of what we're seeing with autism and ADHD and all those other horrific epidemics that are on the terrible rise are partially due to the genes changing because of the chemical exposures. And that sets up the kids immune system and their IQ and what's going to happen to them for life. So I think we really are seeing that, but it's just in a little different way. And doctors need to get that Vulcan mind meld into their brain that the health of the parents and grandparents plays a role into the kids. So we've got to start at the pre pregnancy or the pregnancy level to turn the Titanic away from the iceberg. Because what are we going to do with all these sick children who are then going to grow up and their parents are going to die and society is going to have to take care of them and, and it's a horrific scenario. So we got to get to the root cause of it. So I do think we're seeing DES like, or that's the acronym for the drug my mother took, Diethyl Stabestrol. I think we're seeing that now. We just haven't been trained to understand that yet.

Yeah, I agree with you. And we're also seeing all kinds of chronic disease that at unprecedented levels. Right. We're seeing Alzheimer's at unprecedented levels. In fact, when we dubbed it type 3 diabetes, which is, we are actually not going to be able to sustain our, our system, our medical system as it is, because it is going to break under the weight of this chronic disease tidal wave that we have coming at us right now. And I, I actually spoke at a 4M, the American Academy of Anti Aging Medicine, which I know you're very involved in that institute, institution. My December talk was about metabolic health because that was the. The theme of this conference. And the truth is that I think we all need to be screening for metabolic health with the same vigor that we're talking about screening for breast cancer. And people are so quick to adopt this that, you know, get on that, that breast cancer soapbox and talk about all of these archaic methods of screening that we have been using for decades and decades. And we are ignoring the very thing which can be so easily screened for, which can help to prevent this, this literal tidal wave of chronic disease that's coming at us. So I think that we need to be concerned about fertility, about preparing for healthy pregnancies, and we all need to be concerned about metabolic health. This is of the utmost importance. And this is another way that our hormones are being disrupted, because when you don't have metabolic health, you have hormonal dysfunction without question. I could literally talk to you forever. And I think we are certainly going to have to do a part two. But I want everyone to stay tuned because we are committed to changing how our providers are educated. We are going to be putting on a course that we are offering to providers so that you know how to care for the woman with breast cancer, so that you know how to provide hormones in a safe way, and so that we can offer this population, which there are 4 million women in the US living with a breast cancer diagnosis, 4 million. And these women need our help, they need our attention. And in order to give them what they need, we're going to have to train providers to do that, and we are committed to doing that. So stay tuned for some big announcements from us and any last words you want to leave people with.

Don't be frightened of hormones. They run humanity. We just want to keep our hormones safe. So be committed to making friends with your hormones and finding out how to caretake them and be gentle with them because they're the reason we're here. And I have my new book coming out. It's just being sent to the COVID design editor and it's called Oxytocin Medicine. And it's all about the use of the birth hormone oxytocin in the love hormone oxytocin in clinical practice, and especially metabolic disease and type 1 and type 2 diabetes. So stay tuned. And it's so lovely to have these conversations because you get in on the nuances. So thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. And may the hormone healthy hormonal force.

Be with us all oh, great way to end. And I truly honored and delighted to have had you here. I know that this is our first of many, many, many conversations to come and that it is going to be tremendously beneficial to everyone who was here today. So thank you for joining me today. If you liked this podcast, please share it with someone who needs to hear it. And I know that you are surrounded by people who need to hear it. This is vital information and Dr. Berksen and I are on a mission to make sure that people, providers, we are educated on hormones, that they understand the power, but more importantly that we understand collectively how to drive health. Because that at the end of the day is all of our goals is that we want to live as long as possible and die young. And this is the way to do it. So thank you again for joining me and know that I will be back next week, same time, same place. It's Dr. Jen.

Bye for now.

Thank you for joining me on this episode of the Keeping a breast podcast with Dr. Chen. I hope you found the discussion informative and empowering. Remember, breast health is health, so by staying informed and taking proactive steps, you have the power to optimize your well being. My team and I encourage you to apply the knowledge gained from today's episode to make positive changes in your life and share what you've learned with others. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. Your feedback and support mean the world to us and help us to reach more people who can benefit from these conversations. Stay connected with me on social media where I share additional resources, advice, updates and announcements related to breast health. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Dr. Jenn Simmons and remember, MyGen has two N's, so until next time, remember to stay proactive, informed and confident in your breast health journey. The key to your health is you.