What Does "Balance Your Hormones" Even Mean?

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s Key Learnings:

Flying by? Here are some key take-away ideas from today’s newsletter:

• There’s a finite list of nutrients we need. You can find it in today’s video section!

• Hormones are complicated, but not an unknowable mystery

  • “Balancing” hormones is chiefly advertising talk, but hormonal imbalances are a thing

  • The best way to correct a shortage of a given hormone is to get a prescription for that hormone

  • We can, however, take some supplements and/or drugs that will impact what our body does with the hormones it has (thus increasing or decreasing those hormones’ effectiveness)

  • We can also eat a diet that supports good hormonal health, even if won’t “balance” anything per se. That diet should usually include:

    • Fruits (especially peaches, apricots, strawberries, and blueberries)

    • Vegetables (especially leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, and sprouts)

    • Nuts and seeds (especially flaxseed, pumpkin seed, almonds, cashews, pistachios)

• Walking has a lot more health benefits than most people realize (so many, in fact, that today we recommend a very good book about such—maybe we’ll do a main feature about it another day, though)

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Micronutrients Explained

Nutrition plays a big part in our overall health and fitness and there is a lot that goes on beneath surface and beyond the calories. What follows is a quick refresher of every vitamin and mineral that the human body needs, what it does, and how to get it:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

There are 32 key vitamins and minerals listed here, so we’ll not put a timestamp for each of them, but they’re in alphabetical order so that makes them easy enough to find.

Prefer a downloadable PDF? Click Here for the US Government’s much more comprehensive dietary guidelines booklet

^This is actually a surprisingly good reference guide—it’s comprehensive (144 pages!) and clear, easy to read with infographics and cheatsheets and such. We love clear simple information that’s backed with lots of science, so recommend you do download a copy, even if just for reference later!

🌘 MAIN FEATURE

Hormonal Health: Is It Really A Balancing Act?

Have you ever wondered what "balancing your hormones" actually means?

The popular view is that men's hormones look like this:

...And that women's hormones look more like this:

Clear as mud, right?

But, don't worry, Supplements McHerbal Inc will sell you something guaranteed to balance your hormones!

How can a supplement (or dietary adjustment) "balance" all that hotly dynamic chaos, and make everything "balanced"?

The truth is, "balanced" in such a nebulous term, and this is why you will not hear endocrinologists using it. It's used in advertising to mean "in good order", and "not causing problems", and "healthy".

In reality, our hormone levels depend on everything from our diet to our age to our anatomy to our mood to the time of the day to the phase of the moon.

Not that the moon has an influence on our physiology at all—that's a myth—but you know, 28 day cycle and all. And, yes, half the hormones affect the levels of the others, either directly or indirectly.

Trying to "balance" them would be quite a game of whack-a-mole, and not something that a “cure-all” single “hormone-balancing” supplement could do.

So why aren't we running this piece on Friday, for our "mythbusting" section? Well, we could have, but the more useful information is yet to come and will take up more of today’s newsletter than the myth-busting!

What, then, can we do to untangle the confusion of these hormones?

Well first, let's understand what they do, in the most simple terms possible:

• Estrogen—the most general feminizing hormone from puberty onwards, busiest in the beginning of the menstrual cycle, and starts getting things ready for ovulation.

• Progesterone—secondary feminizing hormone, fluffs the pillows for the oncoming fertilized egg to be implanted, increases sex drive, and adjusts metabolism accordingly. Busiest in the second half of the menstrual cycle.

• Testosterone—is also present, contributes to sex drive, is often higher in individuals with PCOS. If menopause is untreated, testosterone will also rise, because there will be less estrogen

  • (testosterone and estrogen "antagonize" each other, which is the colorfully scientific way of saying they work against each other)

  • DHEA—Dehydroepiandrosterone, supports production of testosterone (and estrogen!). Sounds self-balancing, but in practice, too much DHEA can thus cause elevated testosterone levels, and thus hirsutism.

• Gonadotrophin—or more specifically human chorionic gonadotrophin, HcG, is "the pregnancy hormone", present only during pregnancy, and has specific duties relating to such. This is what's detected in (most) pregnancy test kits.

• FSH—follicle stimulating hormone, is critical to ovulation, and is thus essential to female fertility. On the other hand, when the ovaries stop working, FSH levels will rise in a vain attempt to encourage the ovulation that isn't going to happen anymore.

• Luteinizing hormone—says "go" to the new egg and sends it on its merry way to go get fertilized. This is what's detected by ovulation prediction kits.

Sooooooo...

What, for most women, most often is meant by a "hormonal imbalance" is:

• Low levels of E and/or P

• High levels of DHEA and/or T

• Low or High levels of FSH

In the case of low levels of E and/or P, the most reliable way to increase these is, drumroll please... To take E and/or P. That's it, that's the magic bullet.

Bonus Tip: take your E in the morning (this is when your body will normally make more and use more) take your P in the evening (it won't make you sleepy, but it will improve your sleep quality when you do sleep)

In the case of high levels of DHEA and/or T, then that's a bit more complex:

• Taking E will antagonize (counteract) the unwanted T.

• Taking T-blockers (such as spironolactone or bicalutamide) will do what it says on the tin, and block T from doing the jobs it's trying to do, but the side-effects are considered sufficient to not prescribe them to most people.

• Taking spearmint or saw palmetto will lower testosterone's effects

  • Scientists aren't sure how or why spearmint works for this

  • Saw palmetto blocks testosterone's conversion into a more potent form, DHT, and so "detoothes" it a bit. It works similarly to drugs such as finasteride, often prescribed for androgenic alopecia, called "male pattern baldness", but it affects plenty of women too.

In the case of low levels of FSH, eating leafy greens will help.

In the case of high levels of FSH, see a doctor. HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) may help. If you’re not of menopausal age, it could be a sign something else is amiss, so it could be worth getting that checked out too.

What can I eat to boost my estrogen levels naturally?

A common question. The simple answer is:

• Flaxseeds and soy contain plant estrogens that the body can't actually use as such (too incompatible). They've lots of high-quality nutrients though, and the polyphenols and isoflavones can help with some of the same jobs when it comes to sexual health.

• Fruit, especially peaches, apricots, blueberries, and strawberries, contain a lot of lignans and also won't increase your E levels as such, but will support the same functions and reduce your breast cancer risk.

• Nuts, especially almonds (yay!), cashews, and pistachios, contain plant estrogens that again can't be used as bioidentical estrogen (like you'd get from your ovaries or the pharmacy) but do support heart health.

• Leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables support a lot of bodily functions including good hormonal health generally, in ways that are beyond the scope of this article, but in short: do eat your greens!

Note: because none of these plant-estrogens or otherwise estrogenic nutrients can actually do the job of estradiol (the main form of estrogen in your body), this is why they're still perfectly healthy for men to eat too, and—contrary to popular "soy boy" social myths—won't have any feminizing effects whatsoever.

On the contrary, most of the same foods support good testosterone-related health in men.

The bottom line:

• Our hormones are very special, and cannot be replaced with any amount of herbs or foods.

• We can support our body's natural hormonal functions with good diet, though.

• Our hormones naturally fluctuate, and are broadly self-correcting.

• If something gets seriously out of whack, you need an endocrinologist, not a homeopath or even a dietician.

In case you missed it…

We gave a more general overview of supporting hormonal health (including some hormones that aren’t sex hormones but are really important too), back in February.

Check it out here: Healthy Hormones And How To Hack Them

Want to read more?

Anthea Levi, RD, takes much the same view:

Read: Are Hormone-Balancing Products a Scam?

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

52 Ways to Walk - by Annabel Streets

Most of us learned to walk at a very young age and probably haven't thought much about it since, except perhaps in a case where some injury made it difficult.

Annabel Streets provides a wonderful guide to not just taking up (or perhaps reclaiming) the joy of walking, but also the science of it in more aspects than most of us have considered:

• The physical mechanics of walking—what's best?

• Boots or shoes? Barefoot?

• Roads, grass, rougher vegetation... Mud?

• Flora & fauna down to the microbiota that affect us

• How much walking is needed, to be healthy?

• Is there such a thing as too much walking?

• What are the health benefits (or risks) of various kinds of weather?

• Is it better to walk quickly or to walk far?

• What about if we're carrying some injury?

• What's going on physiologically when we walk?

• And so much more...

Streets writes with a captivating blend of poetic joie-de-vivre coupled with scientific references.

One moment the book is talking about neuroradiology reports of NO-levels in our blood, the impact of Mycobacterium vaccae, and the studied relationship between daily steps taken and production of oligosaccharide 3'-sialyllactose, and the next it's all:

"As if the newfound lightness in our limbs has crept into our minds, loosening our everyday cares and constraints…"

And all in all, this book helps remind us that sometimes, science and a sense of wonder can and do (and should!) walk hand-in-hand.

Treat yourself to "52 Ways to Walk" from Amazon today!

May your path forward be ever easy,

The 10almonds Team