Chronic stress raises cortisol, which kills your metabolism, libido, and erections. Fat and cholesterol aren't the enemy—your body needs them to make sex hormones. Statins and low-fat diets can tank hormone levels.
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Cortisol has a number of effects that are quite harmful, including increasing insulin resistance, prevents, you know, erections in men, and reduces libido. It's better to learn how to reduce cortisol through various lifestyle strategies, including things like meditation, yoga, breath work, your beliefs, your attitudes. There's a lot of work we've done in that on the podcast. But it's really important to learn how to navigate stress in your life and not be overtaken by it, because a lot of the stress that we have is what happens in our mind. That's not necessarily what's happening to us, and that's something we have control over. Low fat diets were promoted for years as a way to lose weight. They clearly work. In fact, you know, large trials reviews of all the literature show that when you compare low fat diets to low carbohydrate diets, the low fat diets always lose. And when I say carbohydrates, I mean starch and sugar. Now, why is fat important? Because all your sex hormones are made from fat. They're made from cholesterol. In fact, all the sex hormones, the building block for all of them is cholesterol. So if you're really dramatically reducing your cholesterol with aggressive use of statins, that also can affect your hormone levels, too, because they're all connected.
