Best Of Hormone Health: Hormonal Weight Gain, Birth Control, Optimizing Testosterone Levels & More!

Fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Life Show. Are you ready to hack your life? Let's do this.

This is going to be a very interesting episode. If you care about testosterone, cortisol, estrogen, thyroid and a whole lot more. This is the Hormone Podcast. The best of hormone health. The best of the best from some of the most fantastic hormone related podcasts that I've recorded of late show notes you can get@BenGreenfieldLife.com hormone podcast that's BenGreenfieldLife.com hormone podcast. First up, we actually have an interview I did with Dr. D down in Miami. We talked about a whole lot including regeneration of the thymus gland, a topic near and dear to my heart because I just got back from Cabo where I underwent the high dose NK killer cell injection from Eterna Health. Dr. Adil Khan, also a former podcast guest, oversaw that. But you don't have to fly to Cabo and get killer cells injected to actually improve and regenerate your thymus gland. Today we're going to talk about that and a whole lot more with Dr. D. If you want to listen to the entire episode for this or any of the other shows that you hear today, go to BenGreenfieldLife.com hormone podcast. Here we go.

I will die for what I'm going to say right now with what your body produces, which is the testosterone and peptides like great peptides like ghk, copper, which is found in the saliva, urine and blood, in the plasma, in the blood.

Your body already makes it.

Your body makes it and needs it. And for example, you start to see an increase in cancer because of the down regulation, the production of ghk. And the GHK is not even a fitness peptide. It's for skin and hair and nails.

And so yeah, it's even used topically in a lot of like hair growth.

And skin care treatments.

And, and you, it's basically the 911 for injury. So you get a cut and your genes all of a sudden upregulate GHK for it to come. But as you age, the production declines and therefore you even see an increase in cancerous activity.

Okay.

Oh wait. Holy smokes. Well, did you just say the lack of peptide promotes can promote cancer? Absolutely. Same thing. You'll see now there's analysis on growth hormone. Brother, it's wonderful. It's one 11,191 participants. They did a retroactive study. So they looked at past studies. They didn't do a new study. So they looked at PubMed Web of China and I can't remember two more large databases and they collected all these growth hormone studies and they showed that in adults. This is actually the title what I'm going to say right now, maybe not verbatim but in adults with adult growth hormone deficiency which many of us have, the, the replacement of growth hormone helps in preventing cancer. And, and I'll wrap it up if.

You have a growth hormone deficiency deficiency.

But now there's another study called the TRIM trial which is stands for thymic regeneration, immuno restoration and insulin mitigation. And even for social proof, not scientific proof. Forbes already done article on this Nature. It was originally published in the Aging Cell and they use dhea, recombinant growth growth hormone and metformin which is a drug. I personally, I don't, I don't like metformin. They use this and they actually show that they can slow down the aging process, which is amazing significantly.

And by the way, I still want to get back to, to what it was the liver King could have been doing that you feel could have been actually dangerous or harmful. But I remember because I like to look and you know this Dr. D through natural lens as much as possible I say okay, well they use the synthetic pharmaceutical. Not that those are all bad, but would there be a natural way to achieve this? And I remember when the TRIM trial came out and I stepped back and thought okay, well let's say somebody doesn't want to use growth hormone. Maybe they don't have a deficiency. Maybe they have downregulated growth hormone receptors because of their diet or there's, there's some issue related to them not necessarily needing to take growth hormone. Well, what about things like natural raw fermented dairy or colostrum or even some of the growth hormone based peptides like cjc, ipamorelin. And then I looked at the, the DHEA I don't have much of an issue with like even my wife, she takes very small amounts of dhea. I think it's fantastic, especially for perimenopausal and postmenopausal women. Guys go back and forth on that. I see some guys seem to do well on it, some double women seem to do really well in like 10 to 20 mgs of DHEA. Yeah, so that one I didn't have a huge issue with. And then the, the metformin was the other component. I thought well gosh, I mean between low level physical activity, cold baths, lifting weights and blood glucose Disposal agents. Right. Like berberine or dihydro hydro bear brine or bitter mill and their apple cider vinegar, whatever. You could probably I would have liked to see like a sidearm. Not that they, they would have done this would have been too complex where instead of growth hormone and metformin and dhea, maybe they try like colostrum and a blood glucose disposal agent and physical activity and maybe some DHA or something like that. But I remember when that study came out, I thought there might be a way to do this naturally too.

So. But here's the thing. The growth hormone, I don't think they used it in the study per se because of the direct benefits of the growth hormone, but they use it. I, I, I, I. It's funny, with somebody that was here earlier today, I actually went over the study so it's kind of fresh in my head. But they use it for the, the ability to regenerate the thymus gland. So that's when you can come in. Yeah, it's, it's, I mean forget, forgive the colloquialism here, but screw the growth hormone. You don't have to use growth hormone. You can use thymus and alpha, thymus and beta for example.

Peptides. Peptides, those are great. A lot of people use those during COVID and long haul vaccine and saw great results.

Even like organic meats and so forth.

Things that you, you can like thymus extract.

Yes.

Or sweet breads.

Yes.

Right.

So, so, and here's, and guys, just to be very clear, I, my, my life philosophy, like I, I, I would rather do all this and honest to God, like I'd rather it's not feasible but move to the Amazon and live in the middle of nature and get true sun. Decrease my chemical burden, which is something we here, I'm like super passionate about. Like before taking a bunch of stuff, I'm like how much chemicals, how much excitotoxins are you exposed to? You know, like where do you live? Do you live next to these crazy towers, glyphosate land, all that kind of stuff. But, so that, that, that's my real inclination. But we live in the middle of a cement jungle which he just wrote a scooter through. And, and it's like okay, these things are impossible. You know, we're talking to attorneys and busy moms and so forth that it's like, okay ma', am, your vitamin D is abysmally low. You're getting osteomalacia because you're like under 15. Vitamin D. So it's like, okay, go out in the sun from this time and this time. Oh, I'm not gonna do it. Okay, fine.

Supplement.

So just so so we're clear, I, I, I, if I can one day actually get this all naturally. And that's why I admire you, brother, because you, you're, you're more isolated. You're, you're, you're doing this in a way more natural way. And I, you know, frill. Not because you're here, but hats off. So, but for those that can't, like the. The art of regeneration of the, of the thymus gland, which I actually just did. The CTA and the calcium score not too long ago.

Yeah.

And they actually wrote embryological remnants still visible of the thymus gland on my case. I was so happy because I'm like.

Oh, crap, is that abnormal to have embryological remnants of the thymus gland at this age? Would it normally degrade by your age?

Yeah, so, so yeah, in medical school they trick us. So first year medical school, and there's doctors listening out there. See, if you remember this. They'll usually, in anatomy first, first semester, second semester, they'll give you an X ray of a baby's, you know, chest, and they'll put an arrow and say, which structure is this? And you're like the professor stupid. It's like, it's the heart, man. And you put heart and go to the next question. Then everybody gets that.

Almost everybody gets it wrong because it's the thymus.

It's the freaking thymus.

Wow. Hey, what about the idea of red light on glands for glandular activation? I have a red light. I have a few. And two different companies have told me that I should use the red light on the thymus to strengthen the immune system and increase thymus gland activity. So I've, it's pure anecdote because I've never seen any studies on photobiomodulation for glandular activation of the thymus. But I do it. And, you know, just because I got the red lights out anyways, in the morning, I just put, put it right kind of over the lower part of the collarbone in the center.

I think, I think it makes perfect sense. I'm a big, firm believer of photobiomodulation. You'll see, like I told you, our new facility, it's going to be bread like galore. Yeah, but that makes a lot of sense. And I mean, and the thymus gland, I mean, now I'm gonna go off on a whim here a little bit, but it seems it even has like some like, extra, let's say, sensitivities to the environment, even like spiritual. There's a lot of, like, if you, if you Google, like thymic tapping, like people that used to tap their time. Thymus in the. Yeah, you know, to release fear or release emotion.

One of the tapping points in the tapping solution book, you know, the eyebrows on the side. Nick Ordner's book, I interviewed him a long time ago. But one of the areas that you tap is thymus cloud. My family and I, we all do tapping every morning. We don't do this whole sequence, but what we do is we do a gratitude practice, meditation, breath work, and memorization of a passage of scripture. And then at the very end, when we're all settled down, I have everybody choose a spot for me. It's over the heart. And we tap for about 30 seconds because based on the concepts of neuro linguistic programming, which is kind of what the whole tapping solution is based around, along with activation of some of those certain points. If later on in the day when you're stressed or you feel as though you need to settle down or return back to that meditative state without doing like 10 or 15 minutes of breath work and Bible reading and prayer to get there, you tap on that same area and allows you to set this like haptic cue that brings you back into that feeling of relaxation. So like right now, I guarantee if we were doing active tracking of my heart rate variability, like using a ring or a metric or whatever, when I tap right over that area, because I've been tapping for three years, every morning right after meditation, my body goes, oh, hey, it's time to settle down. So there's something to it to. To the whole tapping component.

No way, dude. That's super cool.

I'm gonna incorporate that book, the Tapping Solution. A lot of people like it for stress and silly at first. Honestly, I'm like, just tap areas and. But there's another book that's very similar called the Healing Code.

Oh, I know that way.

Just this idea, I think that has some, some tapping in it as well. Next up, one of my favorite interviews about the thyroid I've ever done with Dr. Amy Horneman. Matter of fact, after this interview in which we talk about weight gain, red light therapy, cold thermogenesis for thyroid support, testosterone for women, and a whole lot more, I actually picked up her supplement, the thyroid fixer supplement. I've been using it, it's fantastic. I almost got to be careful because it seems to blast away calories so quickly. It's difficult to maintain weight when I'm using it too much anyways. BenGreenfieldLife.com HormonePodcast for the notes. Here we go with Dr. Amy.

I'm just curious if the added weight is kind of like cortisol related water retention and bloating. If it's an actual formation of new fat in response to a drop in metabolic rate or did you ever think about that or dig into it?

Formation of new fat based on the decrease in metabolism. Because your thyroid's the master. I mean that is the start of all metabolic processes including fat burning. So if your thyroid isn't working, there's nothing that is working. There's nothing that you can do. And this is what I see with the people that I work with. They're doing the most perfect diet, the perfect exercise regimen, they're doing all the supplementation, they're doing peptides, they're doing all the things and they're not seeing the results. They'll say, listen, the scale is not moving down and in fact it's moving up. And that is the thyroid's control over your metabolism.

Okay, so is this related to the whole idea of metabolic set point to where you could be burning? Let's say, I mean like my metabolism is screaming how I was talking to somebody the other day like, dude, you're just like eating all the time. How are you like so lean? And the last time I did one of these, they, they call them indirect calorimetry tests for how many calories that you burn at rest sitting around doing nothing at all. I'm at 3, 200, meaning I gotta eat at least 3200 calories a day to actually keep weight on. But if somebody finds out how many calories they're burning and they're like, oh, I'm going to diet, I'm going to say like 500 fewer calories than that every day. What could happen, it sounds like based on your explanation, is if they don't go back and retest that their thyroid master regulator might actually decrease that natural amount of calories that they're burning to like, I don't know, 1500 calories a day. And so all of a sudden they're back at calorie balance.

Exactly. And then it becomes cyclical. So the people can't burn body fat, their metabolism drops. So what do we all naturally do? We eat less and exercise more. So then that eating less, that restriction to where, I mean, some of my ladies will drop their calories. They're coming in to see me, they're at 1,000 calories a day because they got so desperate to lose the body fat that they just saw pile on that they're restricting, restricting, restricting. And that further drops their metabolism. It drops the T3 production of their own thyroid gland. So it's almost just this really bad cycle that people get into when they're suffering with a thyroid problem and they're not being diagnosed or addressed properly or treated properly.

Yeah.

Compounds on each other and the metabolism goes even lower.

Okay, got it. I got a lot of questions for you about the thyroid. Now, so you said earlier that the doctors run this kind of test for the thyroid, and they test for certain things. Is that test inadequate?

No. No. So you go to your doc, you say, listen, I want to get my thyroid tested. If you don't specify the test that you want, you're going to get tsh, thyroid stimulating hormone. And that's a pituitary hormone. It's not a thyroid hormone. And it's an okay test. But again, in functional medicine, we have optimal lab values. Standard conventional medicine has their standard lab value range. Right. That we said earlier is taken from a group of sick people. Functional medicine takes people like you, takes the fit, the healthy. And we say, where are they at? And that's that really narrow optimal range that we want you to fall into. So with tsh, even just that marker alone in functional medicine, we want that below a 2. Standard medicine won't call you hypo until you're above a 4.5. Now, so it's an okay test if it's screaming at us, if someone comes in and it's like, wow, your TSH is a five. Yeah, there's a problem, but there are so many other tests that we have to test.

Okay, so you got tsh, and first of all, the reference range for that, you're saying should be closer to two than, like, four plus. So if you're looking over your lab values and you got an inside tracker or wellness effects or your doctor scores or whatever, you might have to look a little bit more closely if that flags as a okay. Because that might actually not be a proper reference range for what you would consider to be true thyroid health.

Right, Exactly.

Okay. What else do you test?

Okay, so then we go down the line, we go free T3. That is the active thyroid hormone. So I mentioned I was given T4 that's inactive. We will test the free T4 for sure. We'll do a total and a free T4. And that gives us a little bit of information. But where I really like to focus. What I want to see is the total and the free T3, because that's your active thyroid hormone. And the free form of it tells me how much of that active thyroid hormone is in your body, ready to be taken up by the cells. So if we look at a cell, the receptor site on that cell is for T3. There's no receptor site on your cell for T4. There is for T3. So I want to see how much free active thyroid hormone is in your body. Then I want to look at reverse T3. So reverse T3 is your anti thyroid hormone. The analogy that I love to use is a bouncer at a club. That bouncer is just standing outside your cell door, arms crossed, looking at T3, being like, you're not getting in. You're not getting in today. So if there's too much reverse T3 in the body, it's going to block T3 action at the cell level. Where we see elevated reverse T3Is, is in clinical settings like the ICU, the ER, when you're injured, when you're in a trauma state, that reverse will go up. And it's a survival mechanism. I mean, it's beautifully built into our bodies, but we don't want it elevated. When you're walking around trying to live life that you're not in a hospital bed, we don't want you to have elevated reverse T3. So this also tells me how well you're converting your inactive thyroid hormone T4, over into the active thyroid hormone T3. Beyond that, we test for the Hashimoto antibodies. So that's TPO and tga, thyroproxidase, thyroglobulin. That tells me if you have hypothyroidism, that is an autoimmune form where your body's attacking your thyroid gland.

Okay, got it. Would that only be for Hashimoto's that someone would have these elevated thyroid antibodies?

Yeah, those are just Hashimoto antibodies. I mean, we could run like an ANA screen that's kind of a general autoimmune marker. But the TPO and TGA are just for those auto antibodies attacking the thyroid gland.

Okay, so you got this one subset of people who's maybe not eating enough calories or not eating enough carbohydrates and exercising too much, and you're getting a downregulation of thyroid that you could. That you could test. But then are you saying there's like, another population of people who have an immune condition in which their thyroid is under attack?

Oh, yeah, so 95% of all hypothyroidism is actually Hashimoto's. So we have that, that small percent of the people, just like you said, Ben, that they're over exercising, they're over dieting, or maybe they did chemo, radiation, they're taking a drug that is downregulating their thyroid function. But 95% of hypo low and slow thyroid patients fall into the Hashimoto category. Now it could be that the diet and exercise overdoing it actually flip that autoimmune switch to the on position too. So the overexercising, over dieting, low calorie definitely will have an effect on the thyroid directly, but it's also a stressor on the body that can flip on the Hashimoto switch.

Oh, this sounds a little bit like something like leaky gut syndrome or a food allergy where a stressful incident in life or something that triggers almost like a cell danger response syndrome causes someone to all of a sudden have an autoimmune reaction to certain foods or permeable gut membrane that they never had to deal with otherwise in life. And there's like a life incident that, that flips that switch that maybe they weren't born with, but that is now activated from a, from a stressful scenario.

Yeah, exactly. It's that whole three legged stool analogy. For all autoimmune conditions, we're definitely having a leaky gut that's going to set you up for that autoimmune switch to turn on. And then here comes that stressful event.

Okay, gotcha. And obviously this kind of leads to the question, this is probably a rabbit hole a little bit is what do you do if you find out the values are off? And it sounds like there might be two different approaches depending on which thyroid dysregulation that you're looking at?

Yeah, there is. I mean, here's the thing. Even if you have Hashimoto's, how are we going to treat you differently? Okay, we're probably going to use something like low dose naltrexone, black cumin seed oil. We're going to mandate that you go gluten free because gluten is a molecular mimicker to the thyroid. So that can induce an autoimmune attack. But I'm still going to treat those low thyroid hormones. It's not like, oh, you have Hashimoto's, so you're gonna get T4 monotherapy while everybody else gets T4 and T3. I'm still gonna look at those lab values that we just talked about, and I want to get those in an optimal range, and I want to get you in an optimal range, ultimately eradicating your symptoms. So treatment might vary slightly, but at the the end of the day, we want you optimized.

Okay, Got it. So. So let's go back to the optimized piece. Assuming the Synthroid, as you've just explained, is not necessarily the answer because it's inactive T4, what would you actually do to restore thyroid function?

So let's look at those labs. Right, so let's say you're coming in with a free T3 that is suboptimal. I won't even say low because it's not necessarily going to be flagged low on that standard lab value range, but it maybe it's low according to my functional standards. Then we have to look at the fact that. Here's a. Here's a stat for you. Only 2% of hypothyroid patients do well on T4 monotherapy, 98% do well on T4 and T3 or T3 alone. So right there we have to change the treatment if someone is on T4 only. Not going to work. It's not going to work. We have to add in some T3. So let's add in some T3. We can use natural desiccated thyroid, like armor or NP. I have no problem with. With the synthetics. I have no problem if someone's on Synthroid and they're doing well and their reverse T3 is okay, it's optimal. I know they're converting their thyroid hormone, but the T3 is low. Okay, well, let's add in some lyothyrenine. Let's add in some cytomel. Let's add in that T3 to get a better balance, skip the middleman. Give you some of that active thyroid hormone that your body needs and that your cells require, and now all of a sudden, you're feeling better. Now, if There's a reverse T3 issue where the person is having issues converting, then we might lower the T4 and add in the T3. Maybe we do T3 only. I'm T3 only. I don't convert. I never tested my genetics to see if I have a D101 or D102 SNP, but I don't convert. You give me T4, I get worse. So I'm T3 only. Some of my patients are. It's all about that personalization aspect and finding the right combo that's going to work for that individual what about red light, though? I mean, red light, there's again, a ton of studies on it showing the positive effect on the thyroid gland. And again, you have to have a thyroid gland a. So that red light shining on the thyroid gland, it's actually showing to heal. So if you do have Hashimoto's and like we said earlier, the thyroid gland starts to get all wonky looking and small and kind of beat up. You add in that red light therapy on a daily basis on the thyroid gland itself, and we're seeing some tissue regeneration and a little bit more output of the thyroid hormones. Now. It's not huge, it's not tremendous. Again, it's, it's, it's the marathon thing. You got to do it every day. You have to be diligent about it. I probably wouldn't use that as a monotherapy. So if someone comes to me and they have all the symptoms and they're gaining weight and they're constipated, they're losing their hair, I wouldn't just say, hey, stand in front of a red light and you'll be good. I would do it in conjunction with other therapies for sure.

Yeah. That's interesting. And, you know, I've, I've just seen some of these companies coming out with wraparound red lights for the joints. One company called Kineon has one, and the guy who sent it to me said that it does help out with thyroid function. So rather than just using my knees and my elbows, I've occasionally just wrapped it around the neck, put the red light on the neck. And then the company hired those that for the longest time had this infrared light face mask that you use. Like if you get into a clay mask for beauty or wrinkles or something like that, they just. And I got one last week, they sent one to my house to try. They made like a wraparound red light that's specifically for the neck and the chest. You wrap it around your neck almost like a bib, like a lobster bib. And it does red light starting at the bottom of the chin all the way to about the sternum level. So that'd probably be another option for people who want to do like targeted red light therapy for the thyroid, but maybe can't afford or don't have space for one of these big red light panels or red light beds. Yeah.

And you help your turkey neck all at the same time. That's awesome.

I think that's why they made it was for the beauty aspects. But I was thinking, gosh, there's probably A crossover effect here for the thyroid. That's interesting. Definitely one of the thing that people talk about a lot, and this might be related to or even something that might be stackable with this T2 approach, because you mentioned it, for brown fat activation is cold, like cold baths, ice baths, you know, making sure that you get the neck under or the chin under when you get in there to, to treat the thyroid. Have you seen any research on that or do you like the idea of cold thermogenesis for thyroid support?

I do, I do. Because of that brown fat activation and the decrease in inflammation. So I mean, now you tell a hypothyroid patient who is usually cold intolerant, like they're cold, when everyone else is totally comfortable, you tell them that you're going to do cold, you got to do cold therapy, they're going to look at you like you have five heads. But when you look at the evidence, so we know that the body will adjust. So in, on the one hand, you can tell that patient, listen, I know you're cold all the time, but if you do the, the cold showers, the cold bath, the, the cold therapy, you're going to acclimate. So you're actually, your body will adjust to that. You're going to get the benefits of it. You're going to get that brown fat activation, you're going to get the decrease in inflammation, but you're also going to acclimate and be more comfortable at the end of your therapy, whether it's, you know, you're doing it daily or you're doing it two, three times a week. You know, in a couple weeks to a month when your body actually starts to adjust. Now, you won't be that, that cold person in the room that has to wear a sweater and it's 75 degrees. Your, your body temp will adjust to that as well. So there's so many benefits. I have nothing but good to say about cold therapy, whether you have a hypothyroid issue, a thyroid issue, or not.

Yeah, I think a lot of people forget about that improvement in microcirculation and brown fat formation. That kind of makes it a little bit easier as time goes on, or at least you warm up a little faster. And, you know, for people who don't really like the idea of getting into cold water or maybe can't afford a cryotherapy chamber in your spare bathroom, there's one company, and I have had a few clients who really just detest cold water, get this, that it's called Cool Fat Burner. And I think it's coolfatburner.com, i believe. And they've got this wraparound device that you put ice packs in. They got one for the gut, and then they got one that wraps around the collarbone up by the neck. I think I blank on the name of that one.

Actually. I think the one around the waist is called the Cool Gut Buster or something like that. And the one for the, for the neck is the Cool Fat Burner. But that's an option. You can just, like, use cold packs, you know, in this kind of, like, vest scenario. And interestingly, the cold packs are actually pretty close up around the thyroid gland.

Right.

And like you said, Ben, stacking it. So you stack it with T2 that activates brown adipose tissue. You're activating more bat that is lowering or improving your insulin sensitivity. Lowering your insulin, lowering your insulin resistance. You're stimulating more mitochondria. I mean, it literally just keeps stacking upon itself with the benefits. You just. You can't go wrong. And when you're talking again about a hypothyroid patient, weight is the big thing. Weight and low energy. So when you are activating that bat or you're stimulating white adipose tissue and browning it, oh, my gosh. I mean, your. Your energy improves, your inflammation goes down. Like we said, you're burning more fat. I mean, it has nothing but good. Why not do it?

Have you ever heard of Grains of Paradise?

That's funny. I just started looking that up as a potential to actually put into one of my new formulas. So, yes, I have, because I just started looking at that.

Yeah, it's like one of the most potent brown fat activators. Matter of fact, if you come to my house and we got our Greenfield family logo on everything, it's on the family crest, and there's flags by the front door, the Greenfield family logo. And our pickleball paddles have the family logo or throw pillows or coasters. It's. It's everywhere. But we have this really beautiful custom made wooden pepper grinder that if anybody uses pepper at our house, they think they're using black pepper. That thing's always full with grains of paradise. And I put pepper on just about every meal except breakfast. And that is. That is a super potent brown fat activator. And I looked into the research on it. So, yeah, it would be a fantastic addition to your product. But you can literally just like, buy the grains, you know, from Amazon and put them in a pepper grinder and just use it on your. You Know in your bone broth and your salads and things like that.

Yeah, yeah. Amazing, amazing research with that.

Yeah. And you do, you know, I know that you specialize in thyroid. And again, BenGreenfieldLife.com ThyroidFixer is where people can access the show notes and learn more about you and your website and your practice and everything. But you do a lot of other hormones and a lot of other work. And one thing I just wanted to ask you while I have you on the show. I know we don't have a, a terribly long amount of time left together, but it's testosterone, particularly for women, because I understand, I think I saw an article on your website where you talked about this and I'm curious, what's your take on that? Because I'm hearing a lot of talk about sexual function and orgasm quality and things like this for women who use a topical testosterone or a hormone replacement with testosterone. What's your take on that?

Oh, this is, this is my second passion next to thyroid is testosterone and the importance of, for men and women. So, you know, I mean, really, we're hearing it more and more from men these days, trt, all of that. I mean, it's talked about more in mainstream, but I think women get left behind in this testosterone talk because when we talk about women's hormones, we think estrogen, we don't think testosterone. But testosterone is the most abundant hormone in a woman's body. Now you guys have more of it, but it is our most abundant hormone. And I call it the get you done hormone. It gives us motivation, it gives us drive, it gives us strength, it helps with body fat, helps with libido, it helps with hair growth. I mean, it helps with so many things that if you don't have enough of it, you're not going to want to do anything. I mean, you're not, you're not going to want to have sex.

Yeah.

But you're also not going to want to go to the gym, you're not going to want to work, you're not going to want to think.

Think.

You're not going to want to do so. Testosterone for women is vital. Now here's the problem again. Going back to conventional medicine and those standard lab value ranges, a woman will get cut off in that standard lab value range, most of them end at 48 total. So I'm looking at the total testosterone right now. It'll go like 2 to 48. So if a woman comes in with a test level of a 50, which in my mind is the bottom number for optimal. I like my ladies at 50 or above for testosterone, total testosterone. So a woman comes in with a 50, she's getting flagged high. Her doctor's telling her, oh, you have too much testosterone, you must have PCOS or you have an androgen problem. Meanwhile, she's just hitting the bottom of the barrel of optimal. I really think that, I mean, men, you guys get told you're normal too. If your testosterone is 400, and we know that that's horrible. But ladies, I love. I mean, when you get that testosterone number up and you give a woman who is low in T, you give her testosterone replacement therapy. Whether it's a cream, I will use injectable with my ladies too, trochees, however you want to do it. The only thing I stay away from are the pellets because that's where I see female levels go to dude levels. And that's where you'll get the win in saying, I lost all my hair. It's like, yeah, well, you converted the DHC because your test was a 900, so that's not a good idea.

I was going to say, I assume that you're looking at lab values because I would imagine if you're just looking at total T, you could put a woman on testosterone. See something like over aromatization. I don't know if excess estrogen could lead to a risk of breast cancer or something like that. Or you might see that it's not bioavailable because sex hormone binding globulin is too high because they're under a lot of stress. I would imagine. Similar to a man. You can't just take testosterone as a woman and assume you're just good to go.

Right?

Yeah. No, it's all about the dose, the administration, how she pushes to the 5 alpha reductase pathway. So how she's going to aromatize her testosterone in the dht. We look at that and I mean, we can tweak it, we can personalize it, we can really make it fit her. So if we're using something like a cream, I'll go 10 to 20 mgs per day because there's always a crapshoot with the cream with absorption and utilization with an injectable, I mean, we can do something as simple as like 10 milligrams a week or 10 every two weeks. And that's enough to just bring. I mean, it just lights a woman up. And here's the thing with the, the thyroid too, tying it back. Low levels of testosterone. And this is one reason why women get hit with Hashimoto's more than men because again, you guys have more testosterone for protection. Testosterone protects against autoimmune. So women get hit with Hashimoto's more often because we have lower levels of testosterone in general. And then you have the group of women that just have low T period. And when you give that testosterone, male or female, you actually protect against autoimmune. So you can lower the Hashimoto antibodies by bringing those testosterone levels up to optimal.

Dr. Craig Conover is the OG of Functional Medicine Fantastic Clinic in Charleston, South Carolina, if you want to pay him a visit, he's great. And in this episode, we talk about how to effectively modulate cortisol. All of my chats with Craig are incredible, so you'll want to listen to this entire interview for sure. But this section about cortisol is very interesting. Here we go.

How do we treat or modulate cortisol? And this, you know, as I'm not going to go into specific recipes per se, but I'm going to give you some broad strokes, things to think about, things to go back to your doctor, things to contact us about for sure, because we, we have a lot of experience doing this. So what we start to do is, number one, we test, we want to do. Sometimes we'll start with blood test in the morning as a screen to see what a cortisol level is in general. If we've got, we can, we can learn a lot by how someone's feeling. But if they've got a elevated or even normal morning cortisol in a zone, anywhere from really 14 to 18 on the blood test and they're sleeping well, they're probably doing pretty good. Most people don't have this. So most people, their morning cortisol will be less than 14 and they will complain of not sleeping well. When that happens, we like to do a salivary cortisol test and we can do a salivary cortisol test anyway. That salivary cortisol test checks four cortisols throughout the day and it also checks some other adrenal hormones which we haven't talked about. Dha, DHEA and pregnenolone. So the way I like to think about cortisol is that the adrenal gland is like a factory making cortisol. Cortisol is the main goal. Right. So think of it like a plant making cars or vehicles. Right. The end goal is the car, but along the way they can create some other products as well. And those other products will be something like dhea that DHEA is then further converted into other hormones in the adrenal glands, such as testosterone and estrogen. There's some other intermediary hormones such as androstenedion, as well as even progesterone. So the adrenal gland is like a factory, making all these hormones. Cortisol is the goal, but we still need to make all those other hormones. That's an important point because when we start to lose our ability to make cortisol because of stress, we're going to steal from these other hormones. And this is what we see on these tests is we have lower DHEA or lower pregnenolone. And that's because we're trying to make up for a depleted cortisol. Those hormones are important. DHEA is an anabolic hormone, just like testosterone, just like growth hormone. Pregnenolone is a significant hormone that really is needed in order to make cortisol. So while cortisol is the main goal, those kind of intermediary hormones are really important too. As a side note, pregnenolone is actually made from cholesterol. And if you can think about it, we have at least one generation of adults now have been put on cholesterol lowering drugs, statin drugs. So here's what happens if you lower someone's cholesterol, say they're in their 40s or 50s, and you do a blood test and say, oh my goodness, your cholesterol is elevated. Now we've got a problem. And they are put on a cholesterol lowering medication like a statin. Well, now they can't make enough cortisol.

Right.

If you don't have cholesterol to be turned into pregnenolone, to be turned into cortisol, you can't make enough cortisol. As we've discussed, if you can't make enough cortisol, you can certainly not do all the things you need to do in your life and it will catch up with you. So there is a myth that has been circulating for years, if not longer, that the number one leading cause of heart disease is elevated cholesterol. And that's just not true. It's much more complicated than that. And actually, the number, especially for a man, the number one risk factor for a heart attack, for man is, is low testosterone. So if you're out there and you're on some statin drug like Lipitor, you need to be careful because. And you certainly need to measure your cortisol levels because again, cortisol is this master hormone. Cortisol is what's gonna help prevent you from getting big, bad diseases. Cortisol's gonna help you optimize your health. And if you kinda lose control of that because you've chipped away at your cholesterol production through taking a pharmaceutical, you're going to suffer. So, again, that's just a side note, but we really want to focus on being able to maintain and build that cortisol reserve. Having that reserve allows you to handle stress. That stress we're all going to encounter at some point. We're all going to encounter major stress. We want to ensure that we have that cortisol reserve to help us prevent things like cancer and heart disease, an autoimmune disease. Right. So how do we do this? Well, actually, the best approach is behaviorally. It's not with taking anything. It's with how you change your behavior. It's with what I call deliberate contemplative exercise. So let's talk about what that is. Contemplative exercise can certainly be meditation, but also things like prayer, listening to music, fictional reading, journaling. It is anything that is outside of an external influence. It is introspective. And it is a way to tap back into our parasympathetic nervous system and turn off that sympathetic nervous system. In the beginning of this talk, I started talking about, or I mentioned how meditation might not be the best way for us to do that. It's certainly a good way, but with my clients, I certainly make the point not all of us are able to meditate. I think there's a lot of pressure now for people to feel like you have to figure out the only way to be successful in kind of training your brain and your hormones is to meditate. And that's just not true. Right. Prayer is a very great way to tap into the parasympathetic nervous system. Listening to music, journaling. For me, I like to shoot baskets. I've done that since I was a young kid. For a lot of men, it's something with a ball and playing sports, some repetitive action where you kind of get into that zone. So you don't. I don't want people to feel like you have to sit there and be silent and work really hard to meditate. I think that if you're good at that and that works for you, that's great. But there's lots of other ways for you, to, again, be introspective. And the key is being deliberate. Right. So the key is doing it on a regular basis. It's not saying, I'll get through my day and Then, if I happen to have time, I'll do this. You gotta be deliberate, right? You gotta be proactive so that you can build and maintain this cortisol reserve. So again, contemplative exercise, prayer, meditation, listening to music, fictional reading, journaling, nothing with your phone, nothing that involves a computer. Something that you can just go inward and be with yourself. That's the best way to work on building that cortisol reserve. Another great way, we're going to go over several here. Most of you are familiar with these adaptogenic herbs.

And there's a host of them. So adaptogenic herbs have a long history of really helping to support cortisol. I'm going to name five of them that we use routinely and go into kind of how they work. Number one is licorice root. Licorice root delays the conversion of cortisol to cortisone, has to do with slowing down the enzyme that converts cortisol to cortisone. So you can take licorice root by itself, a dose you don't want to do really more than about 20 milligrams. If you look at supplements over the counter, a lot of those supplements have way too high quantities of licorice root. You'll see quantities, 100, 200, 500 milligrams of licorice root. That's way too high. And that will actually stimulate other hormones like aldosterone from your adrenal gland, which will increase your blood pressure. You may have heard of people taking too much licorice root. So you want a very low dose of licorice root. What we found to be successful, and we'll get into it in a second when we talk about cortisol replacement. But we actually compound licorice root with hydrocortisone in a liquid tincture. And we do so because, again, there's synergy. So licorice roots is a really good tool. Take it in the morning. Another one we like is Holy Basil in a dose of about 500 milligrams in the morning. Holy Basil has a long history, meaning thousands of years, where people would take this botanical herb and they would get a sense of the divine in their world. Any of these botanical herbs, you want to kind of take their flavor, their personality, make them your own. Another great one that we use a lot of is cordyceps, which is a mushroom. Cordyceps. We usually like it as a powder. You can put it into coffee, you can put it into a shake, you can certainly take it as capsules. But cordyceps is a great Adrenal strengthening herb. Rhodiola is another one we like. Rhodiola grows in very harsh conditions, so it's very durable as a botanical herb. With that durability, we want to apply that same durability to our adrenal gland. And then lastly, schisandra berry. Schisandra berry has more of a history in kind of traditional Chinese medicine. Has more of a fun, happy component to schisandra berry. But you again can take that in the morning. What I like people to do is don't take these herbs for more than six weeks at a time. You can rotate them, you can take breaks from them, but they are very tonifying and strengthening the adrenals. And frankly, probably as we go through this list, we should all be doing some of each of these just because we have so much stress in our world, especially in this modern time. There's some critical nutrients we think of that help supply the adrenal gland with the necessary nutrients. The three big ones are vitamin A, vitamin B5 or pantothenic acid and vitamin C. Vitamin A you can get fromi like people to get it from like sources such as cod liver oil. Vitamin B5 you can get from a B complex or vitamin B5 itself. Vitamin C, an essential vitamin. We cannot synthesize it. You know, us and the guinea pigs, we don't make it. So we need to get it. A good dose is at least 3,000 milligrams in a day that you're gonna need to sustain just kinda normal healthy adrenal function. And then lastly, the nutrient we use a lot of here is intravenous nad. NAD is really a coenzyme, but what NAD does is it helps the mitochondria make more ATP energy. So without enough nad, we can't make ATP. Why this is important is for most of us as we're adults, we're in some sort of healing phase, we're working on some stuff or stressed out. And supplying our cells with as much ATP as possible is a really positive aspect or a really positive tool. So we use a lot of intravenous NAD to do just that. NAD is wonderful for the nervous system, but really when we're talking specifically about adrenal health, it's about supplying the ATP energy. We use a lot of peptides in our practice and in the morning, what we, what we like to use, there's one peptide called hexarelin, which really is an energy producer. It is a growth hormone releasing peptide. So you take it first thing in the morning on an empty stomach it is injectable. That's the one I like for helping the adrenals. I'll talk about a couple others that we can take at bedtime. There are glandular therapy, so taking just like one would take Armour thyroid or Nature thyroid. For thyroid support, we can do an adrenal glandular that is usually processed from a bovine or porcine source to give us the kind of the tools for adrenals to work better. We also can use some RNA therapy. This is more cutting edge RNA therapy we can get specifically for the adrenals, for the pituitary, for the hypothalamus. And again, this helps us apply those cell lines with the, for lack of a better term, nutrients to help revitalize them. We also can use intranasal stem cells. Intranasal stem cells seem to have more of an impact on that hypothalamus. And again, we want that hypothalamus functioning as efficiently as possible because that's one of the parts of the brain that sends a signal to the pituitary. So intranasal stem cells, as well as intravenous stem cells work well here, too. I also want to talk about hydroquote cortisone or cortisol replacement. They are synonymous. So when we think of cortisol, when we give people cortisol, we're actually giving them hydrocortisone. If you remember I talked about, there's a dose we want to stick to that's 35 milligrams. We, on average, as adults, we put out 35 milligrams of cortisol in a day. So when we give people cortisol replacement, just like we would for thyroid, just like we would for testosterone, growth hormone, we're giving them hydrocortisone. We don't ever want to exceed 35 milligrams in a day. As long as we don't do that, we're not going to suppress their adrenal function. The reason we would choose hydrocortisone over, you know, any other therapy is when their adrenal function is really, really poor, they're in true adrenal fatigue. We've measured their morning cortisol and it's bottoming out. Those people cannot respond to botanical herbs, they cannot respond to other treatments, and they absolutely need cortisol. And so we'll give them hydrocortisone either as a capsule or we'll compound it with licorice root as a liquid tincture. And we'll have them do that throughout the day. And that can work phenomenally. So I have many patients on hydrocortisone who are doing super well. The caveat being, when we place them on hydrocortisone, they're going to be on it for a while. It usually usually takes one to two years minimum to rejuvenate the adrenals. And the challenge there is that it only takes a month or two for people to start feeling better. Right. So we give them hydrocortisone. Now they have more energy. When they wake up, they're able to do more, handle stress better. Now they want to go exercise again. Well, they're not caught up. And so it can be a back and forth, ebb and flow type of arena until we really kind of reach that point where their adrenals have taken over again. I have a patient who's been on hydrocortisone for a year. We just did his salivary cortisol test, and his looks perfect. And so what we're gonna do is we're gonna try to back him off his hydrocortisone. I think he'll respond pretty well, and within a month or so we'll be off the hydrocortisone, meaning his adrenals have caught up, his adrenals have recovered, and he can make all that cortisol on his own. So those are the main things we'll do for morning to help people kind of rejuvenate that morning cortisol that needs to be put out in the evening. There's several things we do as well. And sometimes we'll do this simultaneously. Again, we're going to base this on how somehow the client feels basis on cortisol testing. And there's. There's a handful of therapies I like to use. The first is something called phosphatol symptoms. Phosphodylserine is. It's an amino acid, serine, which we had tasked a phosphate group on. And what that does is that allows the pituitary to be more sensitive to cortisol. For all of these hormones, there's feedback loops. And so when that cortisol is secreted in the bloodstream, it also travels up to the blood. If there's sufficient cortisol, the pituitary won't put out ACTH telling the adrenals to make more. More cortisol. We can enhance or amplify the sensitivity of the pituitary to cortisol with phosphatidylserine. So I like people to take it at night, and over time it will lower the amount of cortisol they need in their world. So it's a great way to lower the nighttime cortisol. Another great way is using the botanical herb ashwagandha. A lot of people use ashwagandha in the morning. They really should be using it at bedtime because what ashwagandha seems to do is clean out the cortisol from the cortisol receptors. So if you use it over time again by cleaning out those receptors, you just don't need as much cortisol in your world. So you can take it at bedtime. The dose there, well, let me back up dose for phosphatolserine, anywhere from 100 to 300 milligrams. Ashwagandha, you can take big dosages, so 300 to 3,000 milligrams. On the same token, we use a lot of glycine. Glycine is the smallest amino acid, great for the liver, but also calms down the nervous system. As such, helps us tap back into that parasympathetic nervous system, helps us relax, be calm, helps us not need as much cortisol dose. There is anywhere from 1,000 to, I mean very high doses, but 1,000 to 5,000 milligrams at bedtime. We also use a lot of CBD. CBD is again the endocannabinoid system. System taps directly into the adrenal system. So if you're looking for kind of a direct connection, CBD is one of those tools that will allow youryour adrenals to, you know, kind of settle down. So CBD is great. You can take it throughout the day, but certainly at bedtime. For someone who is an over excreter or secretor of cortisol at night, CBD is calming for a lot of people. A little bit sedating helps people relax, helps people with anxiety. So we like to use cbd. We can use combination of all these things as long as we're not, they're not too sedating in terms of peptides. Three main ones we use, we use epitalin, which does help to kind of reset the circadian rhythm. We'll use Nelon, which helps us put out more melatonin. And then we'll use some of the growth hormone releasing peptides such as Ipamorelin, GHRP6, GHRP2 again at bedtime so we can put out more growth hormone. Again, there's that interplay with cortisol growth hormone. And we want growth hormone at night and we want cortisol during the day.

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I have thoughts on the Pill.

I did a podcast episode about everything you need to know about dangers, how to get off it safely, safe and more natural birth control alternatives. And today you're going to hear the best of the best of that episode, including how to safely come off of birth control. If you've been on it, why, you might want to think about doing that, an overview of hormonal birth control, the adverse effects of it on athletic performance, and a whole lot more. All right, here we go. You wrote this book beyond the Pill, and I think a really good book place for us to start would be how the pill is working exactly. Because that'd be a good way to also explain, you know, the different phases of the cycle and how the pill is impacting those. And you know, my audience loves the science, loves the nitty gritty and we, we certainly have time to get into this. So can you get into how the pill works? Exactly?

Absolutely. You know, I was a 10 year pill user myself, really grateful for birth control. I'm a first generation college student and I can look back to this tool that I utilized. And yet it wasn't until I actually got into naturopathic medical school that I understood how birth control worked or even how my menstrual cycle worked. Now, when it comes to the pill specifically, I think the most important Thing for people to understand is it works at your brain level. Now, there are so many stories basically that go around about birth control and that, oh, it's just impacting your ovaries. Well, so let's back it up. How do the ovaries know when to ovulate? Well, the brain signals to the ovaries. And so essentially, when you take the pill, it's a high enough dose of hormones that you will digest it, your liver will try to process it, and then it's going to impact the brain by shutting down brain ovarian communication. Now, really important to understand is that not all of the pill is going to be absorbed in the small intestine. It actually will make its way into the large intestine, which we can get into. Why that's a problem further down the line. But you have to understand that when people say, well, I'm taking a low dose hormonal birth control, well, comparatively speaking to the first iteration of birth control, it is lower dose. However, it's still a high enough dose that your system tries to essentially detox it out. But there's enough hormones to tell the brain shut down communication to the ovary. So we don't fire off follicle stimulating hormone, fsh, and we don't fire off luteinizing hormone, lh, so we don't get follicles ready. And so we don't mature an egg for ovulation. And because LH doesn't spike, we don't ovulate. This is all fantastic if you don't want to have a baby. But when we wake up to the reality that birth control works at the brain level, we can start to understand why women have complained of mood alterations and essentially neurological symptoms since the introduction of hormonal birth control.

Hmm.

Okay, so basically, when you're shutting down FSH and lh, can you compare and contrast that to what should normally be happening to FSH and LH during a normal menstrual cycle?

Totally. So even while we're on our period, so day one is the first day that you have a flow, and even while we're on our period, we are getting eggs ready, and that is by way of follicle stimulating hormone, telling the ovaries, let's mature an egg. So we're going to mature some eggs and then we're going to pick a winner and we're going to ovulate. Now, during a normal menstrual cycle, that is without any hormonal interruption, we will see that FSH rises and estrogen Rises in the first half, what's called the follicular phase. Then we're going to spike estrogen, and then we're going to spike luteinizing hormones. So estrogen goes high, it tells the brain release luteinizing hormone. Luteinizing hormone tells the ovaries release an egg. Now, this is the best part of the menstrual cycle in that once we ovulate, what's left behind is a structure called the corpus luteum. That structure secretes progesterone. Now, what you find in birth control, every single form of hormonal birth control, is progestin. Progestin does not have the same benefits of progesterone. And in fact, we've never had a long term study to tell us what happens to a woman's body, let alone her brain, when she is essentially put on birth control after starting her period and stays on it for decades at a time. Because progesterone stimulates the GABA receptors in our brain, which helps us feel chilled out and calm. It also helps with fluid retention. So women on birth control will experience weight gain sometimes. There's a whole lot of reasons that can be, but one is water retention, because they don't have natural progesterone, they have progestin, which isn't going to have that diuretic effect. And when our progesterone's right, we feel chilled out and calm and in love with life. We're not finding ourselves crying all the time, feeling really irritable, having depression. And most notably, when progesterone is low, we experience anxiety. Which is why some experts believe being on hormonal birth control can lead to anxiety.

Is it a myth that progestin that's used in these birth control pills is made from pregnant mare horse urine?

So that was, that's Premarin. And that's actually when back in the day, they were trying to make bioidentical hormones and come up with all these hormones for postmenopausal women. And that is made from horse urine. And that's when we had those stories or stories, excuse me, studies that showed horrific outcomes with hormone replacement therapy. And especially when we give estrogen, that's not challenged by progesterone or, you know, and this is most specifically for bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. That's where we can get in really big trouble. Because estrogen, left unchecked, can stimulate tissues to grow, and those tissues can sometimes be cancer tissue. So in the breast and the uterus, and as you were talking about with Hormonal birth control. You know that synthetic estrogen and progestin is associated with increased risk of certain cancers, so, like breast cancer, liver cancer, brain cancer. On the flip side, it does decrease ovarian cancer and endometrial cancer as well.

Okay, now what about this progestin? Would it actually shut down or downregulate the body's own ability to make progesterone?

Absolutely. So we see this with the hormonal IUDs. So once upon a time, women were told by their doctors that progestin delivered via an IUD was localized and stayed in the uterus. I actually was just lecturing in Vegas and had to say, you know, the uterus is not like vagus. What happens there doesn't always stay there. And what we found out is that the progestins do go systemic. And what's really important is how did this get started, this idea that it stayed localized? Well, we actually didn't know the metabolites. We needed to be measuring it in the blood. So you place progestin, you measure progestin, you're not seeing it. Except that we forgot that the body will actually metabolize these hormones, as will the different organisms that live in our body. We actually have no idea what the microbiome is doing with these hormones. But when it comes to these IUDs, we do see that some women stop menstruating and stop ovulating. So with that, you if a woman stops ovulating, it's because it's impacting her body at the brain level.

What about the effect of the Pill? Because we do have a lot of exercise enthusiasts who listen in on athletic performance. Do you know of any studies that have looked at the Pill in relation to exercise?

Oh, yeah. This is fascinating. So women have been given hormonal birth control. So they're male coaches would say, like, oh, your menstrual cycle, it's going to get in the way of things. Let's put you on birth control, and that's going to make you a better athlete. Except that hormonal birth control, in shutting down your ovaries, it can shut down testosterone production by as much as 50%. It then alters your liver at the genetic level to express higher amounts of sex hormone binding globulin. Now that liver is not betraying you. It's like, this is way too many hormones in our system. We've got to gobble up some of these synthetic hormones to keep our body safe. Except it's going to grab onto that testosterone as well. Testosterone is essential for muscle mass, for energy production, for bone health. So in that way alone, it can actually inhibit women's athletic performance. And recent studies have come out showing that women on hormonal birth control, athletes specifically, they fatigue faster while on birth control. Their muscle gains are less, Endurance goes down. So now, you know, researchers are saying, don't put your athletes on birth control. Actually leverage their menstrual cycle. You can work with their menstrual cycle to make tremendous athletic gains. And you know who just did this? The US Soccer team. The US Women's soccer team decided to do what, like, people like me have been, like, shouting about for years, which is work with that women's menstrual cycle to, you know, make an exercise plan that's conducive to what her body is doing. They just won. They just crushed it. And I think that's phenomenal. And, you know, one of their. Their coaches and all of this, he actually created an. A whole app around this so that you can plug in your data of your menstrual cycle and start working your routine around that. And so, you know, just briefly, if we know that in the follicular phase, so you're on your period, your testosterone, estrogen are rising, your energy is going to go up, you're going to stimulate muscle mass. This is when women, you know, about a week after their period, they're like, oh, I can lift so much. Like, I can run a marathon. Like, there's so much more I can do. Whereas when we get into that luteal phase and specifically leading up to our period, that's a great recovery time. That's a great time to recover your body. Work on, you know, stretching. And when I've worked with patients and not, you know, not just stretching, but just being really mindful of, like, you don't just stop moving. Yeah. You don't just say, like, oh, well, I'm going to get my period soon. I'm just going to stop moving. No, no, no. But when I've worked with patients in this way, and I'm like, okay, I want you to dial back this week, and then I want you to go hard this week. They make tremendous gains in their fitness goals.

Now, if somebody's listening in, let's say a woman is listening in, or maybe a guy's listening in and he wants to approach his significant other about getting off the pill, can you just stop cold turkey? And if not, why not?

Mm.

Okay. So when it comes to hormonal birth control, it's an all or nothing situation. So with devices, it makes a little more sense, right? Remove the implant, remove the IUD, remove the NuvaRing, don't replace that patch. But when it comes to the pill, sometimes women are like, well, I'm going to go ahead and wean myself off. That's a really bad idea. And here's why one is you won't be protected against getting pregnant. So it's only effective if you take the dose the way it's designed. And so understand that the, you know, the 99% effective at preventing pregnancy that the pill gets is if you are a perfect user. If you're a typical user, it's about 91%, which is to say that nine out of 100 women using hormonal birth control, the pill specifically, will get pregnant in a year using it. Now, when you come off, it is a cold turkey. You just need to stop it. You don't want to wean off. Because the other thing is that if you're cutting your pill in half or quartering it and these things are tiny, so it's hard to do. Your brain isn't getting enough hormone to be shut down. So it's going to be like, okay, let me tell the ovaries to fire off. Wait, no, we're not going to fire off. I've had women right knee and they're like, I'm getting hot flashes now and I'm having, you know, acne. I'm having all these symptoms. And it's like, because you're messing around with your chemistry in a big way, like you were messing with it before. And understand that hormonal birth control, when you come off of it, it's a huge hormonal shift and we often forget that piece. Doctors are like, just come off. Everything will be fine. Until it's not. And most often it's not. So it's an all or nothing situation as they talk about and be on the pill. If you started hormonal birth control for symptom management, which is almost 60% of women these days are actually using it for painful periods, heavy periods, acne, irregular periods, understand that when you come off, those symptoms are going to come back. So whatever symptoms you use to treat the pill with or any form of hormone, hormonal birth control, those are going to come back post pill, unless you've done something like changing your diet, changing lifestyle practices to really work on the root of those issues. Now, if you have those symptoms, you should give yourself a good three months to prep. So often women will hear Some of these things, and they're like, I just need to get off right now. If you have endometriosis, if you had cystic acne, prep your body for a good three months. You know, as you were talking about with metformin, you often women get prescribed hormonal birth control. If they're polycystic ovarian syndrome women, pcos, they're also going to get metformin. That's going to take a big impact on your microbiome. So the pill isn't completely digested in the small intestine. It actually will make its way into the large intestine. And research studies have compared it to antibiotics in terms of what it does to the microbiome. But how many people do we know that take antibiotics every day for decades on end? That just doesn't happen. So, you know, it's things like that that we're gonna have to work on and support. And I would never want to see a woman jump off of birth control. If you get cystic acne right away or your periods are terrible because of endometriosis, you're gonna feel like a failure. You're gonna go right back on it. So prep your body a good three months.

Coming up next, an interview with the testosterone replacement expert, I should say the testosterone optimization expert, Jay Campbell. We talk about nasal gel, some new FDA approved form of testosterone, whether or not it works, how to address the effects of EMF on testosterone, how to optimize your hormone levels, and a whole lot more. So this one, along with all the other shows you hear, you can access all the shownotes and everything else for it. BenGreenfieldLife.com HormonePodcast Here we go.

One out of four men between the ages of 20 and 35 have a testosterone deficiency. And the problem with that information is that that's only the men that are being measured. So imagine how bad it really is.

Because a lot, a lot of guys will only measure if they feel like something's wrong. So there's probably more people out there. Did it come up at all at the medical conference, anything that surprised you as far as environment? Because a lot of people are aware, Jay Right. Of like plastics and styrofoam and maybe the BPA on receipts at the gas station or something like that. But were there any particular elements that really surprised you as far as environment, environmental barriers when it comes to testosterone production?

Yeah, I mean, I, I don't think your audience is. Because you cover this so well and you do such deep dives with so Many different people on this. But dude, dirty electromagnetic frequencies are in the major cities are absolutely terrible. So, you know, obviously you already know about blue light. I mean, let's just put it this way. It's almost inescapable now for younger men and women. I mean, right now we have the worst fertility crisis in the, in the history of the world. I mean, again, and since first world being measurement, you know, it's very difficult for 30 mid-30s and early-40s couples to have kids. Especially if you live again in large urban coastal population centers. I mean it is really, really bad. And I think it comes from everywhere. Again, you know, blue light computer screens, you know, being fixed on technology from video games and Netflix and all this stuff. It's rewiring dope dopaminergic pathways in the brain.

So that, so that would be a lot of the primary hypogonadism. You're not saying like if you're shining blue light on your balls. What you're saying is the actual exposure to some of these electromagnetic frequencies can result in more of a primary hypogonadal effect.

It's definitely both. I mean, you know, if you talk to the docs, you know, they, when they get a six, I mean this is, you know, the normal story now. A 16 to 18 to 20 year old kid comes in, their parents bring them in and then they say, my son, you know, had a testosterone test done, you know, with direct labs or private IMD labs or you know, one of the independent places and he has a 150, a 120. I mean I had, I was talking to doctors or seeing kids who are under 20 that have 70 less sub 100 total testosterone and free testosterone levels that are like basically non existent. And the only thing that they can, you know, extrapolate or you know, basically pontificate is that it's due to video games, lack of exercise, obviously crappy food. You know, just young men are not, and you know, this goes actually to women too, because you could make the same argument with women in that many of them are quote unquote, you know, reaching puberty earlier, menstruating earlier. It's just basically the, the way that they are living is different than the way that you and I lived. People are not outside grounding in nature. They're not taking part in outside athletics. Again, there's obviously various people that are, but the majority is not.

Not my sons. Maybe I need to buy my son some EMF blocking underwear which I actually own and use. I'm not like brand Specific, but I think there's one company called Lambs, there's another company made, called Snowballs and they make the, the icing underwear or the underwear that keeps the temperature cool, which is a whole different discussion. But man, my sons are eating fresh eggs from the chickens. They're outside in the sunshine all day. They're rarely on devices except for school. And they're finally starting to go through puberty and you know, they're rolling in jiu jitsu, they're playing tennis, they're lifting weights. And now when I, you know, like when you hug your kids, like I'll hug them in the morning and they'll hug me back and it'll be like a vice grip and it's kind of cool. See my sons going through puberty and you know, developing muscles and fitness and drive and aggression and I feel pretty good about where they're at. But based on what you've just described, I probably should buy him some EMF blocking, you know, teenage boy boxes.

I mean, that's, that's what you have to do. I mean, you know, My daughters are 15 and 13 and they're also very athletically inclined. My 15 year old is in cheer and gymnastics. You know, she flips across the room like 12 times. But as parents, we really do have to be proactive and obviously teach them healthy habits. And again, I know your books do a great job on all this and again, I don't want to rabbit hole on this, but the situation is that right now our society, at least in the west, is being contaminated. It's like a.

Multi siege environmental contamination effect across everyone, both male and females. And again, if you're not proud, active, and do the things that you and I talk about all the time, you're behind the eight ball. And it's happening now for younger and younger men, which is just, you know, literally insane. But to get back to like the original, you know, thread of, you know, me writing about testosterone and then just becoming my own biohacker, you know, I was using peptides, Ben, since 2004, you know, in the deepest. Yeah, so in like the deepest part of like when I was really into the self experiment, fermentation and using testosterone on myself. And by the way, I've used, you know, as I said in the first podcast, I've used every injectable, I mean, delivery system, including injections, you know, transdermal, transcrotal. I've even used troches, I've used patches. I've experimented on every different way. But at the same Time.

What about intranasal?

So I haven't used intranasal, but I'm very familiar with it. You know, Dr. Remsami in Miami is kind of the guy that was really behind doing that. And now they have. Obviously Natesto is actually an FDA approved form of testosterone. Some people tell me that it's okay, but majority of people that I've spoken to and also physicians that are prescribed it says that most patients that use it get headaches and various other, you know, call them quote unquote side effects or irregularities. So I mean it's like everything. You know, some things work for some people, some things don't. But you know, with testosterone it's still the same old tried and true. The two best delivery systems by far are injectable. And again, when I say best, I mean to simulate the body's natural diurnal pulsar release of endogenous testosterone. And that's going to be either daily injections, microdose injections, or every other day or what I use, which is the transcrotal testosterone cream, which again you place on the base of your scrotum. And again the reason that is is it's eight times more permeable. And that's through like eight or nine, maybe even more. Now scientific studies that show that and, and again that's also the half life of transcrotal Testosterone again is 200 milligrams per milliliter. Testosterone is about four to six hours. Now all men, and of course women excrete testosterone differently. They cleave it in the bloodstream molecularly at different rates and speeds. And so some people who are quote unquote hyper excreters of testosterone, both male and female, may need a second dosage of cream in the day. But again, everybody's different on that stuff. So there are now, as I was telling you a year ago, there are oral delivery systems that are attempting to be patented. There's a couple that are already FDA approved. They're so weak in all the studies they get guys testosterone to 300 to 400 and free to 20 to 25. But for anybody who's a clinician who's doing this regularly and understands this, that's not optimal. You know, especially when we understand that as we age our natural production is cessating or you know, lessening. So why would we want, you know, normal of lessening when we, when we can have optimal? So I mean, again, it's always the same thing. It's like if you're going to work with a physician that does this, make sure they understand how to do it and that they've been working with a lot of different patients for a long time.

So for, for kind of like the average guy, even though I know averages are tough to approximate, using something like the scrotal cream approach and doing the microdosing that you recommended, simply because as you alluded to on the last podcast, these big bullish injections in no way simulate the natural diurnal variation of testosterone that should occur from day to day. And so you do something like the microdose injection, or as you alluded to the microdose cream, about how many milligrams in the average dose of cream would you use if you're doing like a little bit in the morning and a little bit in the evening? Scrotally?

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I mean, so the preparation and this is a problem. It's actually better. It's a amazing question because it's complicated to answer it. The bigger problem is that across the world now there's a lot of different compounding pharmacies. And we're going to talk about compounding pharmacies at the end of this podcast because it's a very important point. But you're compounding various different milligram dosage amounts, right? So at the beginning, as you know, all of the quote unquote bad studies that were done on transdermal testosterone were androGel, which was 50 milligrams per milliliter, which is absolutely almost a non existent amount of testosterone when you understand how testosterone again is molecularly cleaved in the bloodstream for men as we age. So that dosage and delivery system was absolutely useless because nobody ever got any kind of even restoration or optimization. And now you have compounders making 100 milligrams per milliliter, even 150. But all the studies that show benefit are at 200 milligrams per milliliter. And there's like three different, three different brands. There's like HRT, there's Atrovaceous, and I forget the other one, but it doesn't matter. They're all basically compounded 200 milligrams per milliliter. So to answer your question, normally the recommendation for scripts for docs that write scripts for this for men is 2 to 3 clicks in a top 8 click applicator, right? So you just kind of twist it until it comes out twice or three times. And that's either going to be dosed one time in the morning and possibly another two to three clicks in the afternoon.

How many milligrams would there be in a click or in two to three clicks?

Well so it's, it's 200 milligrams per milliliter. So basically typically three clicks is going to be 200 milligrams. Right. So if you're doing two clicks you're probably somewhere between 100 and 150 milligrams. Now that amount.

So you'd be at like two and a half to three grams per week. Yeah, if you were doing it twice a day.

You can't extrapolate milligrams and grams from injectable to milligrams and grams and cream because of the delivery. I mean because the half life is so much shorter. So in transdermal even all that much, the way it's cleaved in the bloodstream, most of it is not used and it's not accessible. So that's why it's, that's much higher dosage than actually the injectable which again is a higher impact delivery system because it crosses the blood brain barrier and also gets into portal circulation faster. So it's just something to understand that the difference between injectable and cream is that the way it's molecularly absorbed is totally different and that's why you need a higher dose of the cream. And again the, it's just a much shorter half life. Some people, if they use three clicks in the morning and they're a hyper excretor of testosterone, they could literally be almost efficient by six or seven o' clock at night, you know what I mean? And so that's why they take a second dosage. But for me I, I've never had to take a second dosage. I'm not a hyper excreter. I usually take 2 to 3 clicks if I go away on a weekend with my wife and we want to get frisky or something like that, maybe I'll apply another couple clicks in the afternoon.

You notice the effects that acutely, huh?

Yeah. I mean again because the half life is so short so you know, most guys who start with the cream are going to notice something within, you know, first time users are going to notice something within 48 hours without question. You're going to notice enhanced dopamine signaling. You're going to enhance, well, being better energy. And again this is just the way the testosterone molecule, you know, cleaves and, and estrophizes in the bloodstream. But again we're all different and you know, when you're working with a physician that understands how to, you know, prescribe this. They're gonna notice your effects and, and, you know, work with you and connect with you and communicate with you over the first couple of weeks that you do it to kind of really tailor your dosage or titrate down or even maybe titrate up. And again, we're all so different. I mean, I see a lot of people that just are like, dude, I have to take a second dose dosage of the cream because by four or five o' clock I start feeling down. So, you know.

One of the things that Dr. J. And again, all the. There are so many of them out there now. You probably know 20 people that look at people's DNA and analyze polymorphisms and all that stuff. They can tell you if you're a hyper excretor. Some people too, when they take therapeutic testosterone, they have magnesium depletion issues and it literally freaks them out. I won't tell you stories of things that I've heard from some of my doctor friends about working with people who have that issue and what happens to them. They get like, go paranoid and have anxiety. I mean, it's a very small percentage of people. But, you know, obviously for the most part, most people who use therapeutic testosterone feel amazing on it.

Why? Why do some folks recommend, instead of getting on therapeutic testosterone to take something like Clomid or some kind of aromatase inhibitor? What's the logic behind that?

Well, there's no logic behind using an aromatase inhibitor for testosterone optimization other than just misreading the studies or the science. As you know, on our first podcast, and as I continue to be a beacon of knowledge when it comes to teaching people, we'd never want to ever block estrogen under any circumstances. And of course, when I say under any circumstances, there's always an outlier position. But for people using therapeutic testosterone, and this even goes into the bodybuilding world, who are using obviously, you know, high dosages, super physiologic levels. Testosterone is the anabolic signal with, along with dht, which is dihydrotestosterone. But the protective effects come from estradiol, which obviously aromatizes into estrogen. And we need healthy, and I would even argue high levels of estrogen to confer protection to all of our biological systems. Right? So the heart, the vasculature, the brain, bone mineral density, all of these various organ and biological systems in our body are protected by higher levels of estrogen. And all of the science shows this, that there has been a misinterpretation and also a misextrapilation of seeing men who have high estrogen levels but also high inflammation and visceral fat levels. And so what ends up happening is they correlate the high inflammation and high visceral fat with the high estrogen. And then they tell people, and when I say they, I'm talking about doctors who misread this, that there are high estrogen symptoms. There's no such thing as high, high estrogen symptoms. This is a total misinterpretation. There's high inflammation due to high levels of.

My brain just melted fat, obviously estrogenic fat, which again is visceral body fat. And that is all due to metabolic dysregulation. Dysregulation, again from like obesity, too much belly fat, blah, blah, blah. So there's no such thing as high estrogen symptoms. There's just high inflammation and high estrogenic body fat, which again, is visceral body fat, which is extremely inflammatory. So this is where people get confused. So when you take therapeutic testosterone, you never block estrogen because you need as much estrogen as possible to confer all of the healthy effects that estrogen again confers to all, all of those organ systems. Now, bodybuilders will take AIs and take also SERMs, which are selective estrogen receptor modulators for various things, because again, they're taking super physiologic levels. And when you take that high of levels. And by the way, we're not talking about what you and I are talking about, we're just kind of just making this aside so people understand this. But even when they take massive levels of steroids and other things, they obviously have a lot of estrogen. Not estrogen, but aromatization from all the various drugs blocking the side effects that come from that, which are obviously water retention, mood imbalances.

Just kind of not feeling stable because you have so much drug circulating in your system. Taking an AI to suppress, again, what they think are the side effects from it is so harmful. There's a lot of people out there now, physicians that are doing tests. You can do DEXA scans. You can also do biological age tests, and you can see what AIs, which again, aromatase inhibitor locking medications do to your biological age, to your telomeres. I mean, they're basically cell decayants. I mean, literally, I would say over time and again, you know, when, when there's more data from the biological age tests aggregators, you'll be able to see what people that are using when they use AIs. And by the way, this also is going to get into as we get deeper into this, when we talk about hair regrowth and loss. It's the same thing with DHT inhibitors. So basically all these things that block natural God given created systems.

You mean like Rogaine or something like that?

Dude, all of them. Now obviously the clinical versions are stronger than the over the counter versions like Rogaine. But yeah, like Finaster and dutasteride. All of these five, they're called DHT inhibitors. What is it? PD5 or whatever. Inhibitors. I mean all of these things are horrible to biological system health. And again in the next three to five years, my assumption, and maybe it'll take even longer because everything moves so slow in medicine. We are going to start seeing that men who have been using high dose AIs and high dose DHT inhibitors are having really poor biological age values because of what they're doing to the telo.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode. Hope you learned a little about hormones. Again, all the shownotes are at BenGreenfieldLife.com hormone podcast thanks for listening in and I'm Ben Greenfield wishing you an Amazing Week from BenGreenfieldLife.com do you want free access to comprehensive show notes, my weekly roundup newsletter, cutting edge research and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life and a whole, whole lot more. Check out BenGreenfieldLife.com it's all there. BenGreenfieldLife.com See you over there. Most of you who listen don't subscribe, like or rate this show. If you're one of those people who do, then huge thank you. But here's why it's important to subscribe, like and or rate this show. If you do that, that means we get more eyeballs, we get higher rankings. Rankings. And the bigger the Ben Greenfield Live show gets, the bigger and better the guests get and the better the content I'm able to deliver to you. So hit subscribe, leave a Ranking, leave a review. If you got a little extra time, it means way more than you might think. Thank you so much.

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