Healthy Hormones And How To Hack Them

It’s “Pot-Luck Thursday” at 10almonds, and today we’re going to talk about some of the best things in life—food and sex! But from a health standpoint. We cover:

• The things you can do to boost nutritional uptake from your food

• The forgotten hormone that can have a big impact on your mood

• The hunger gremlin and what gets it going whether you want it or not

• The big two: testosterone and estrogen, and things that affect them

• The big hefty (but very readable) manual of sexual function

Today’s edition is packed with info, so, dive in!

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

7 Ways To Boost Your Nutrient Absorption

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⚕️ MAIN FEATURE

Healthy Hormones And How To Hack Them!

Hormones are vital for far more than they tend to get credit for. Even the hormones that people think of first—testosterone and estrogen—do a lot more than just build/maintain sexual characteristics and sexual function. Without them, we’d lack energy, we’d be depressed, and we’d soon miss the general smooth-running of our bodies that we take for granted.

And that’s without getting to the many less-talked-about hormones that play a secondary sexual role or are in the same general system…

How are your prolactin levels, for example?

Unless you’re ill, taking certain medications, recently gave birth, or picked a really interesting time to read this newsletter, they’re probably normal, by the way.

But, prolactin can explain “la petite mort”, the downturn in energy and the somewhat depressed mood that many men experience after orgasm.

Otherwise, if you have too much prolactin in general, you will be sleepy and depressed. 

Prolactin’s primary role? In women, it stimulates milk production when needed. In men, it plays a role in regulating mood and metabolism.

Read: What Causes High Prolactin Levels in Men?

And then… how about the hormones unrelated to sexual stuff entirely, like ghrelin, say. That’s not a typo—it’s a real hormone, we promise!

Ghrelin’s job is letting you know that you’re hungry. Without it, we’d quickly starve.

This means that if someone trying to lose (or maintain) their weight has a diet soda thinking “this doesn’t contain calories and won’t cause weight gain, and in fact may help me to feel full so I will eat less”, that (very reasonable) logic will backfire! The carbon dioxide will stimulate ghrelin production, and they’ll feel hungrier than before. In fewer words:

Have a diet soda ➜ the carbon dioxide stimulates ghrelin production ➜ you feel hungrier than before

(The cynical amongst us may wonder if there’s a reason many restaurants offer free refills on carbonated beverages)

If you take one piece of health-related information away from today’s newsletter, let that be it!

It can make such a difference to weight management.

Before we sign off on hormones for now, though, we know some of you will have opened this email in the hopes of advice on improving your sex hormone levels, so let’s give some attention to that…

The most reliable way of increasing a given hormone level is simply to take that hormone.

Estrogen is prescribed to most women over a certain age (often 55+), and similarly, a lot of men over a certain age (often 45+) benefit from getting extra testosterone, though this is less common.

The reason it’s less common may be partly because of a degree of social stigma associated with a man having low testosterone levels, but the fact is, these things do happen with age.

If you are in the appropriate age range, there’s a chance you may benefit from asking your doctor about a blood test to check your hormone levels.

But what if you want to give your hormone levels a helping hand without actually taking extra hormones?

Diet is a good first port-of-call:

• Reduce alcohol intake

• Get plenty of vitamins and minerals.

• In particular, zinc is essential in the body’s production of estrogen and testosterone.

  • So have some almonds! Or apricots. Or broccoli. Or a zinc tablet, whatever suits you.

“What about soy products?”, we hear you ask.

Enjoy them in moderation if you want; skip them if you prefer.

The plant estrogens contained in those products are so little and so biologically incompatible with our physiology that they don’t make a big difference unless something unusual is going on (e.g. some pre-existing hormone imbalance, or a very large consumption of soy).

There is an important exception when it comes to plants for estrogenic effects, though:

Pueraria mirifica—It doesn’t have a name in English, sorry. It’s called “กวาวเครือ”, kwao krua, in Thai. It’s popularly sold as a remedy for low estrogen levels, because it does contain plant estrogens that do fit our estrogen receptors. There is good news and bad news, though:

• It does do the things it claims! It’s great for skin, it relieves vaginal dryness, and can stimulate breast growth

• It doesn’t do them nearly as well as bioidentical estrogen does (so, the kind that comes either from your ovaries or from a pharmacy), and you only have so many estrogen receptors.

• In other words: if your estrogen receptors all have the plant estrogens from Pueraria mirifica sitting on them, then they can’t get the benefit of the “better” estrogen you may otherwise have available.

Bottom line: Pueraria mirifica can help some people who have low estrogen, but can actively hinder the body’s use of “better” estrogen.

So, we recommend going to an endocrinologist sooner than shopping for this supplement, if at all possible.

If you do want something herbal that will help with estrogenic effects, you might want to try spearmint!

While spearmint does absolutely nothing for your estrogen levels of any kind, it is a testosterone antagonist (ie, it acts against testosterone), and what reduces testosterone will tend to improve most of the features associated with estrogen (because testosterone and estrogen are antagonistic to each other, i.e., they each counteract the other).

Most studies on spearmint’s effects on testosterone levels in humans have been done on women with PCOS and hirsutism—here’s one, for example.

Studies on mice and rats have shown that spearmint also has a strong anti-androgenic (e.g., anti-testosterone) effect in male animals too, but we know of no human studies for that—probably due to a shortage of male volunteers!

So, if you’re a man and want to keep your testosterone levels high, you might want to give spearmint a wide berth for this reason!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Come As You Are - by Dr. Emily Nagoski

We’ve all heard the jokes, things like: Q: “Why is the clitoris like Antarctica?” A: “Most men know it’s there; most don’t give a damn”

But… How much do people, in general, really know about the anatomy and physiology of sexual function? Usually very little, but often without knowing how little we know.

This book looks to change that. Geared to a female audience, but almost everyone will gain useful knowledge from this.

The writing style is very easy-to-read, and there are “tl;dr” summaries for those who prefer to skim for relevant information in this rather sizeable (400 pages) tome.

Yes, that’s “what most people don’t know”. Four. Hundred. Pages.

We recommend reading it. You can thank us later!

Get your copy of Come As You Are from Amazon today!

Wishing you the very best of life today and every day,

The 10almonds Team