What Does the Body Do with Hormones?

The bigger piece is what is your body doing with these hormones? So we can find out if your sex hormone binding globulin is holding all these hormones and they're not even available to send their signals. But we also need to know, once the signal has been sent, what is your body doing with that hormone? It should normally be getting deactivated, AKA metabolized in the liver and sent to the urine and stool for excretion and removal. But that doesn't always happen. There are amazing functional medicine tests in the urine and saliva that can show us how your hormones are being metabolized and handled through your body. And are they being appropriately deactivated and removed? There are some. So much testing that we can do in the functional medicine space that will give you so many more answers to what's going on. So I do want to share with you an example of a Dutch test, which stands for dried urine testing for comprehensive hormones. So you get a kit, you pee on these pieces of paper, they dry, you send them in, and then they test not only the levels of your hormones, but what your body's doing with them. So first I want you to understand that all of our sex hormones and our stress hormones come from a cholesterol backbone. So we need healthy cholesterol fats to even make our hormones. That's key number one, you need enough healthy fats in your diet. And that looks like at least three to four servings every day. Of course, grass fed butter or ghee, avocado, avocado oil, healthy animal fats from grass fed beef, pasture raised chicken, you know, that type of thing. Organic free range eggs. You need healthy fats. Nuts and seeds are a great source as well. Coconut and coconut oil. So you have a cholesterol backbone. And then your ovaries and your adrenal glands make sex hormones. And so they start out, they make pregnenolone. As you can see up here on the top, pregnenolone gets made into progesterone. Progesterone is our calming balancing hormone. It is what's needed to keep the lining of your uterus stable and not overgrowth. It keeps estrogen in check. Estrogen is a growth hormone. It makes things grow. It makes your uterus grow. It makes your boobs grow, it makes your hips grow. And progesterone keeps all that from over growing. It also can be very calming because as you can see, progesterone gets metabolized on two different pathways. It can go down the 5 beta pathway or the 5 alpha pathway. The 5 alpha alpha, that's hard to say. That is more of a neurotransmitter and it can cross the blood brain barrier and actually affect your mood. And it has to do with gaba, one of our main calming neurotransmitters. And so having enough progesterone and having it metabolized on the five alpha pathway can be like your natural anti anxiety. It's like nature's Valium. It helps you sleep and feel balanced and good. So these important information about progesterone is like what are you making enough of it from ovulating and how are you metabolizing it? So that's really helpful. Pregnenolone goes also to DHEA and endostein dione. Those can be turned into testosterone and testosterone can go down a 5 beta or 5 alpha pathway as well as opposite of progesterone. 5 alpha down that testosterone pathway is more androgenic, meaning more manly. We don't want too much 5 alpha metabolism of testosterone that makes DHT and this looks like hair loss on your head, acne, abnormal chin hair growth, belly hair growth, all of that too much testosterone type symptoms. So you don't want want your testosterone to be metabolized down this five alpha. The way this sample test is showing and I should explain on this sample test the green in the middle is, you know, where things are optimal. The stars are kind of the edges of too low on the left and too high on the right. And for this sample they are making way too much dihydrotestosterone and that person is most likely having symptoms from that.