Are Your Bioidentical Hormones Hurting You?

by Glen Depke, Traditional Naturopath

Many women are currently using bio-identical hormones to assist in combating menopause symptoms. For some women, this can help their symptoms, while many are still dealing with the symptoms of hot flashes, sleeplessness, brain fog, low sex drive, weight gain, depression and more…

Regardless of whether this is helping your symptoms or making no difference what-so-ever in how you feel, this can still be leading to challenges for you long term.

Let’s first look at estrogen dominance.

This would be defined as an elevated level of estrogen hormones in the body, regardless of this accumulation showing up in the blood but also the tissue of the body.

Based on viewing thousands of hormone saliva test kits through my career, I can share that very often estrogen levels will be fine, or even low, according to blood testing, yet you can take that same person, showing estrogen dominance with a saliva test because of the build up of estrogen hormones in the tissue of the body.

That’s an issue!

If there is a build up of estrogen in the tissue, this is a risk factor for breast cancer in women among many other chronic health issues.

I have seen countless women that are using estrogen creams, and interestingly enough, are still showing low levels of estrogen hormones based on blood testing, yet they have elevated levels of estrogen in the tissue. As example, one woman that was postmenopausal and put on estrogen creams by another practitioner, yet when we testing this via saliva, her level was above 30, and it should have been between 1 – 3. And her blood showed low normal.

Yikes!

That’s a serious consideration for all the women out there on bio-identical estrogen creams.

Unfortunately, I see this all the time…

There is often another challenge with women taking testosterone.

I often see women come into our wellness center and they have been put on testosterone cream along with the estrogen creams. We still have the same issue here with absorption of the creams, yet there is yet another issue here.

The challenge is that many times this testosterone is converted into estrogen due to an overproduction of an enzyme called aromatase. So in the end, this added testosterone often is not increasing testosterone, but actually increasing estrogen.

Yikes again!

I have seen this many times in the past and I expect it this will continue because of the popularity of bio-identical creams.

Many people will ask why the aromatase would be overproduced and that answer is simple. This is due to the fact that this production is tied into elevated insulin levels. High insulin is driven but eating too much sugar or processed foods and also by stress levels.

So the next time you are looking at estrogen, don’t only look at blood. You may be missing some essential and potentially life altering information.

It is always best to educate yourself on any recommendations based on the use of hormones. What you think is helping you, can actually be hurting you.

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