Dr. Tabatha Barber explains how your body breaks down sex hormones and why the 4-hydroxyestrone pathway matters. When this pathway exceeds 11%, it can form DNA-damaging compounds, so you need glutathione, B vitamins for methylation, and antioxidants like NAC and DIM to protect yourself.
This is another page from a Dutch report. This kind of shows you how your body is metabolizing your hormones. So it shows me, When I make testosterone, do I make too much of this dihydrotestosterone? When I make my estrogens, estrone, estradiol, estriol, do I send them to the liver when I'm done to be deactivated and removed from my body, Do I recirculate them and use them again? Do I change them to estriol? Or do I send them down this intermediate pathway, which we don't want too much of, called 4 hydroxy estrone? 4 hydroxy estrone can cause a quinone reaction that we don't love. This reaction is what has been known to damage the DNA inside of your cells and increase the risk of your cells going rogue and developing cancer. Obviously, it's a way more complex. It depends on how inflamed your cells are, what your antioxidant status is, your gene status. But too much of this red pathway is concerning and so you can shift all these pathways. This is the first thing we talked about this morning. If you take something like dim diindomethane, which is an estrotame, it pushes your used up estrogen to the liver more effectively so it doesn't go down the red pathway. You can block the red pathway so that it doesn't damage your cells. You do that by making glutathione, your major antioxidant. If you can't make enough glutathione, it's probably because you need NAC and acetylcysteine. That is a major ingredient to make glutathione. NAC is in energy lift because it's absolutely necessary to block that path, especially if you're on hormone replacement therapy or birth control pills or anything like that. This methylation picture that they show you, you need to be able to methylate, meaning putting a chemical, a carbon and a hydroxy group on your estrogen to get it out of the body. And if have enough B vitamins, you don't have anything to get a methyl group from. So the methylated B vitamins are in the energy lift along with the other antioxidants to block this pathway, like resveratrol and EGCG and all these good things. So you can get a lot of this from your food, but sometimes it's not enough. I will do Dutch tests on women and if your red pathway is above 11%, we got to get super aggressive. We have to up your antioxidants we got to get more B vitamins in there. We have to shift how you're metabolizing your hormones. And sometimes diet is not enough. So as you can see, like, this stuff is all super complex, and everybody wants to try and make it so simple. I barely scraped the surface, but I hope that gave you a good overview of how this is all interconnected and how it's all affecting your weight, how you feel about yourself, your mood, all of these other things.
