Hormones And How They Affect You

Your body’s biochemistry is a beautiful balanced system that is largely still way beyond the comprehension of science and medicine. One of the most important and finely tuned systems in your body, which profoundly affects every other system in your body, is the steroid hormones.

Other hormones in the body include insulin and growth hormone (and even vitamin D is considered a hormone), but in this article we’ll stick to the steroid hormones.

The steroid hormones include pregnenolone, progesterone, DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone), the estrogens, the androgens, the cortisols and testosterone. You probably recognize these as the hormones secreted by your ovaries and your adrenal glands. The building block for all of these hormones is cholesterol, which is in turn made from the breakdown products of foods you eat.

The steroid hormones regulate and play a part in a seemingly endless list of functions in the body, including your sex characteristics, our sex drive, thyroid metabolism, insulin regulation, blood pressure, behavior and moods, inflammation, allergies and on and on.

These hormones work together and when one is out of balance, the others tend to follow, so you can imagine how important it is to help your body maintain hormone balance. Let’s take a brief look at some of the hormones.

ESTROGEN: THE HORMONE OF FEMININITY AND CELL DIVISION

Estrogen is actually the name of a class of hormones. Some of its better-known members are estradiol, estriol and estrone. To confuse matters, the drug companies refer to their weird not-found-in-nature estrogen-like drugs as estrogens. But don’t be fooled. Premarin, for example, is made from a plant-derived human estrogen and a pregnant mare-derived estrogen. This is called a conjugated estrogen, but it certainly doesn’t resemble anything found in the human body!

When girls reach puberty and begin to experience bodily changes such as growing breasts, underarm hair and pubic hair, as well as the unseen changes of development of the uterus, vagina and fallopian tubes, estrogen is the hormone driving these changes. It is also responsible for a woman’s curves, those extra deposits of fat that aren’t particularly popular in our culture at this time. (At one time they were considered the height of beauty and femininity.) When a young woman’s estrogen levels, along with the levels of other hormones, rise high enough, she will begin ovulating and having menstrual periods.

Like her other hormones, a woman’s estrogen will ebb and flow during the course of her menstrual cycle. Estrogen is highest at the beginning and middle of the cycle, when it is stimulating the uterine tissue to grow, providing a rich, blood-filled womb for embryo growth. This property of stimulating cell growth is both what makes estrogen a feminine hormone, and what makes it dangerous when it is found in the body in excess or unbalanced by progesterone. Estrogen doesn’t just stimulate growth in the uterus; it an also stimulate the growth of alls in breast tissue, ovarian tissue and cervical tissue.

Estrogen also causes the body to retain water. This accounts for its ability, when it is the dominant hormone, to cause weight gain, bloating, irritability, headaches and other brain symptoms such as foggy thinking, memory loss and depression.

ESTROGEN DOMINANCE

Dr. John R. Lee, the leading authority on the use of natural progesterone to balance hormones, has coined the term “estrogen dominance” to describe what happens when a woman has an imbalance of hormones characterizes by estrogen unbalanced by the hormone progesterone. Even if a woman’s estrogen levels have dropped, say at menopause, if her progesterone levels have dropped even further, her hormones will be unbalanced and she will suffer from estrogen dominance. In other words, it’s not an estrogen dominance, it’s too much estrogen relative to not enough progesterone.

Both women who have suffered from PMS and women who have suffered from menopausal symptoms will recognize the hallmark symptoms of estrogen dominance: weight gain, bloating, mood swings, irritability, oversensitivity, tender breasts, headaches, fatigue, depression, hypoglycemia, clumsiness, uterine fibroids, endometriosis, and fibrocystic breasts, just to name the more common symptoms.

Because progesterone is supposed to be the dominant hormone during the premenstrual phase of a woman’s cycle, for years PMS was blamed on progesterone. Ironically it is precisely a deficiency of progesterone that is causing the problem, at a time in the cycle when it was supposed to be dominant.

Dr. Lee believes that many illnesses that afflict women in the US are caused by estrogen dominance, including uterine fibroids, breast ovarian and uterine cancer, fibrocystic breasts, hypoglycemia, low thyroid, gallbladder disease, autoimmune diseases such as lupus, and miscarriages. Next month, I’ll I’ll talk more on estrogen, menopause and HRT.

Dr. Earl Mindell, R.Ph., Ph.D. is a nutritionist and the author of Vitamin Bible and many other books on health and nutrition. His website is www.doctorearlmindell.com