Dr. Sharon Stills explains how estrogen becomes toxic in your body. Xenoestrogens from the environment, a sluggish liver, and an imbalanced microbiome all trap hormones that should leave. Your detox pathways use the liver, gut, and bile, but stress and poor lifestyle choices can jam them up.
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For me. What's particularly, I'll say, interesting or poignant is just what happens with hormones when they instead of act like hormones, they act like toxins. Can you talk about that? First off, why does that happen? How does it happen?
Yeah, I mean, it happens for numerous reasons. Part of it happens because of what's going on metabolically with us and having an imbalanced microbiome and having stress, and we can dive into these things deeper. And then part of it happens because especially with estrogen, there's all these estrogen mimickers, these xenoestrogens in the environment. I mean, from our body care products to something as unsuspecting as the receipts you get in the supermarket.
And I never touch those. I'm always like, no, I'm good.
I know. I'm like, oh, you know, let me put on my bio hazmat suit, and then you can hand me the receipt. Yeah. I'm like, no, that's good. We're fine. You know, and I remember growing up in my household, like, my father would study the receipts to make sure, like, correctly. And now I'm like, you know what? I'd rather have healthy hormones than maybe get a $50 back. So I am. So, you know, we're just. I remember being in med school many, many years ago, over 20 years ago, and one of the professors saying, we're swimming in a sea of estrogens, and these are environmental toxins. And that always stuck with me, that, like our estrogen, our own endogenous estrogen production is. Is good for us. And I think that's why estrogen, she gets rap. Because we don't really differentiate out, like, oh, yes, there are good estrogens that we produce and that we need and that are important for our brain and our bones and our heart and our immune system. But there's all these xenoestrogens, these chemicals and these toxins in our. In our society that are. That are just messing with our whole system.
And, you know, the thing that I love on top of that, to add on to that, is that I remember when I learned about this, when we. We learned about that, as you're Processing your hormones. It goes through phase one in the liver, and then it goes through phase two in the liver. And at any point in there, we can have a breakdown. And then it goes to your gut. And if you don't poop regularly, it's going to get acted on by the beta glucuronidase and separated from its bound form, which makes it no longer water soluble. And then you recycle it into your bloodstream and your liver's mad because it already had to deal with it and you store it in your fat. So what woman is like, oh, great, let me put on five pounds of fat on my butt or on my inner thigh or on my arms. No woman wants that. I don't think any man wants it either, but I think we're prone to it more than men.
Right? Well, and it brings up such a good point, because the beta glucuronidase, which is part of what we call our strobalome, the part of the microbiome that's more specific to the hormones. And so that has to do with our bowels, and that has to do with our liver, and that has to do with our bile flow. And so when we're thinking about hormones, it really broadens the picture because there's so many systems in the body that really need to be moving. And so this goes for chronic disease, this goes for autoimmunity, this goes for hormone balance. We have to open up all our eliminatory, or I call them the amountaries. That's an old naturopathic term, but we have to really be focusing on opening up our eliminatory organs. And these include the lungs, the liver, the bile, because I think we often forget about the gallbladder and the bile, which is so important. The gut, the lymphatic system, the kidneys, the skin, if you're a menstruating woman. The uterus is another way we are detoxing each month. And so where I start with patients is assessing and looking at all those organs, because if those aren't open and those aren't functioning, then we are going to have chronic disease set in because we can't get rid of. And so, you know, the bottom line is it's a toxic place we're hanging out in now. And it's, you know, I don't see it getting any better. I mean, and we can kind of bang through all these avenues of toxicity because it's not just the pesticides, it's not the chemicals in your laundry detergent, it's the wifi. It's the dirty electricity, it's the 5G, it's the thoughts you're thinking, it's the stress and the byproducts metabolically of what's going on when you're stressed out. And so, I mean, and it's on and on and on and on. It's the food you're eating, it's the water, it's the air. Like, oh my God, how depressing. I mean, I know every time I go to the environmental medicine conferences it's always like, oh my God, bring a box of tissues because I'm just going to be crying because there's so much, much to be upset about. But on the other hand, there's so much we can do to empower ourselves. It's like if we know, okay, there's a lot of toxins, but what can we do to put ourselves in the best position? That we're exposed to less and that the toxins we are exposed to that are among teres are working optimally. So we, you know, it's the difference between why does a room full of 5 people and a mercury thermometer drops. Why do 2 people end up with Ms. From the mercury toxicity and 1 person gets a little sick and 2 are fine. It has to do with how we handle how we process and how we get rid of toxins that we're exposed to.
Yeah, I mean there's a lot that goes into this. You've touched on how we live, how we think, what we're eating, our movement, our sleep, the exposures we've had. And then I think what you're also touching on is our epigenetics and our DNA. And I remember Joe Pizzorno saying, you're only 15%. What happens to you is only 15% due to DNA. The other 85% is modifiable. Lifestyle factors inspire and empower someone else by leaving a five star review so.
