Most people think of hormones simply in a sexual context. The fact is that every function within your body is controlled by hormones, from your libido to your sleep cycle to your hunger response to your body temperature. All of these signals come down from a complex cascade of originating hormones you may never have even heard of, from the pituitary-hypothalamic axis in
your brain. You may have thought it was just about testosterone and estrogen. Most people do.
But this incredibly intricate, interconnected hormonal net-work we so often take for granted is related like a set of domino chains. When our bodies need to perform a specific function, this domino chain is triggered with pinpoint precision and each dom-ino causes the next one to trigger. It’s like a finely tuned orchestra where the success of every step depends on the one before it. If even one note is out of tune, the entire orchestra sounds “off.”
Imbalanced or low hormone levels can create many problems in the body, the least of which is making you feel lousy with no energy. The problems begin when a doctor runs a blood test and finds a patient’s testosterone level is low. Since the patient is, for example purposes, a fifty-year-old, the dip is attributed to “nor-mal aging,” testosterone gel is usually prescribed, and the patient is moved down the “conveyor belt” out the door. This is a per-fect example of “symptom management.” The symptom is feeling lousy attributed to low testosterone, so the patient is treated and sent home. On the surface, this seems perfectly appropriate. But there is a problem. A big problem. No one asked why the testos-terone level was low in the first place.
Testosterone is produced in the testicles in males. Every phys-iological part of your body needs to be exercised or “worked” to stay healthy, and the testicles are no exception to this rule. If you don’t work out, what happens to your muscles? They lose their form and begin to slowly waste away. Ever notice what a bro-ken arm or leg looks like after being tabro-ken out of a cast? It looks ridiculously smaller compared to the opposite limb because the muscles atrophied from not being used. The same type of thing happens to the organs that produce hormones in our body, including the testicles.
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When supplying testosterone, in this example say to a body builder, the body slows down its own supply of testosterone because there is “too much” testosterone coming into the body.
The constant supply of “extra” testosterone the body builder is introducing into his body causes the normal organ that produces testosterone (the testicles) to shut down to keep from having too much testosterone in the body. This is why many bodybuilders who use testosterone and other performance-enhancing drugs experience extreme, irreversible testicular shrinkage, which occurs because the testicles are no longer being exercised as they normally would be when they are producing testosterone.
What happens is the protective physiological mechanism known as the negative inhibitory feedback loop (NIFBL), designed to keep the hormones in balance, gets initiated to pre-vent overproduction of hormones. This NIFBL is the messenger system that makes sure the balance is being achieved and hor-mones are not being overproduced, which can cause many medi-cal conditions and contribute to the cancer process. The result of artificially meddling with this process by giving “outside” hor-mones causes the NIFBL to further shut down and inhibit the very gland designed to produce the hormone in the first place.
The crucial point to understand is that it doesn’t matter whether you’re using synthetic hormones or bioidentical hor-mones. By giving the end hormone, whether it’s bioidentical or synthetic, you’re short-circuiting the process and shooting the messenger. The real question that should be asked is, why is the hormone level low in the first place?
The controversy over bioidentical and synthetic hormones and the media hype surrounding it is so foolish, it’s no wonder chronic disease continues to increase. The issues that are really important are being ignored because of the illusion that’s created
surrounding this controversy. In reality, those understanding physiology know that the argument between bioidentical ver-sus synthetic hormones is really irrelevant. The question is, what caused the body to fail to produce its own necessary hormones in the first place?
During the process of treating the group of thirteen women mentioned earlier, and without my conscious realization, I was addressing all three of the foundations we’ve discussed. These women underwent systemic detoxification (for mercury and other toxins); they had their immune systems modulated (sim-ply by removing substances that are known immunosuppressive agents, such as mercury); and they finally achieved hormonal optimization with minimal, if any, direct intervention.
Separating Hormone Facts from Fears
In recent years, several therapeutic options in the arena of hor-monal manipulation have been made available to reportedly help people live not just better lives but to actually become physiologi-cally younger and have the promise of a longer life span. The goal behind all these therapeutics is to increase one primary hormone, known as human growth hormone (hGH or GH). GH steadily begins to drop off after we reach our early to mid-twenties. By the time we’re in our forties, our GH levels have significantly dropped compared to what they once were. According to one study, 35 per-cent of men over the age of sixty were found to be GH deficient.5,6
5 D. Rudman, A.G. Feller, H.S. Nagraj, G.A. Gergans, P.Y. Lalitha, A.F.
Goldberg, R.A. Schlenker, L. Cohn, I.W. Rudman, D.E. Mattson. 1990.
Effects of Human Growth Hormone in Men Over 60 Years Old. New England Journal of Medicine. 323 (1):1–6.
6 Ian Chapman, Mark Hartman, Suzan Pezzoli, Farnk Harrell, Raymond Hintz, K. Alberti, Michael Thorner. 1997. Effect of Aging on the Sensitivity of Growth Hormone Secretion to Insulin-Like Growth Factor-I Negative Feedback. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. 82 (9): 2996–3004.
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In another study, GH production rate in all adults was determined to fall by 14 percent with every advancing decade, with some that don’t produce any growth hormone at all.6,7
GH is essential to health and vitality for several reasons. Not only does it promote the creation of lean muscle mass, eliminate unnecessary fat and give you a more youthful appearance, it’s also essential for every cell in your body to regenerate and grow.
Whatever the need for regeneration in your body, GH allows those cells to rebuild. It’s because of all these reasons that there has been an enormous rush by health-care practitioners to take so-called longevity medicine to the next level. As a result, several therapies to increase GH levels have been heavily promoted in recent years.
However, the problem is that in the rush to “cash in” on the mass market of people who are interested in looking younger and lured by the promise of living longer, the science has gotten lost along the way. This has led to several therapies that aren’t just ineffective, but are highly dangerous for patients to be taking. As an example, the use of injectible GH has been directly correlated with increasing Insulin-like Growth Factor—Type 1 (IGF-1).
This is definitely not a desired outcome because IGF-1 is directly related to oncogenesis (process of cancer formation), not to men-tion the fact that cancer makes its own IGF-1 as well.8
7 A. Iranmanesh, G. Lizarralde, J.D. Veldhuis. 1991. Age And Relative Adiposity Are Specific Negative Determinants of the Frequency and Amplitude of Growth Hormone (GH) Secretory Bursts and the Half-Life of Endogenous GH in Healthy Men. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. 73 (7): 1081–1088.
8 Jing Ma, Michael Pollak, Edward Giovannucci, June Chang, Yuzhen Tao, Charles Hennekens, Meir Stampfer. 1999. Prospective Study of Colorectal Cancer Risk in Men and Plasma Levels of Insulin-Like Growth Factor (IGF)-1 and IGF-Binding Protein-3. Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
91 (7): 620–625.
The first response in the hormonal rush (pardon the pun) was GH injection therapy, which involves receiving self- administered daily injections of synthetic GH at a cost ranging between $600 and $2,400 per month. It was soon discovered that putting some-thing completely synthetic into your body may not be a good idea for many reasons. Big surprise! Within six months to a year, patients reportedly ended up with many complaints, including heart problems such as cardiomyopathies and joint issues such as carpal tunnel syndrome, joint effusions and even acromegaly.
Again, the physiological safety valve consisting of the NIFBL, which also serves as a messaging system for the hypothalamus, comes into play. Injecting GH violates this safety feedback loop, just as in the testosterone example given earlier. Plus, the use of injectible GH has been directly correlated with increasing IGF-1, which in turn has been associated with increased risk of multiple cancers, as was previously mentioned.
Laboratory studies have shown that IGFs exert strong mitogenic and antiapoptotic actions on various cancer cells. . . . IGFs also act synergistically with other mitogenic growth factors and steroids and antagonize the effect of anti-proliferative molecules on cancer growth. The role of IGFs in cancer is supported by epidemiologic studies, which have found that high levels of circulating IGF-1 and low levels of IGFBP-3 are associated with increased risk of [many] cancers.
IGFs are related to increased cell proliferation, suppression of apoptosis and increased cancer risk.9
9 Herbert Yu, Thomas Rohan. September 20, 2000. Role of Insulin-Like Growth Factor Family in Cancer Development and Progression. Journal of the National Cancer Institute. 92 (18): 1472–1489.
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Next came the wave of secretagogues (vitamin, herb and amino acid combinations marketed as precursors of GH and IGF-1). Advertisements for them have been clogging up your e-mail with spam for years. These are the supplements you take orally or sublingually (under the tongue) or you spray into your mouth. They’re sold at most health food stores, gyms and even some doctors’ offices. Some of them even go far as saying they contain actual GH in homeopathic doses. The simple truth is that these products don’t work. If they did work, they would have already put the more expensive and far more popular GH injection therapy out of business.
If there is any difference temporarily experienced by the user of these substances, it’s due to the high dextrose (sugar) content within the product that may make an individual feel like they have more energy. But the same can be achieved with a cup of coffee.
Most of these products also claim to increase IGF-1, attempt-ing to ride on the marketattempt-ing “coattails” of what appears to have become the misguided goal of GH injection therapy. The ques-tion is, why in the world would anyone actually want to increase the very substance that cancer itself produces to maintain itself and has been correlated with in numerous studies?
But the GH industry has created an illusion that defies logic and common sense. Of the 180 or so products on the market that fall into the GH-promoting category, none has ever been shown to actually increase GH levels based on any current testing meth-odologies, and virtually all tout the increase of IGF-1 as a desired benefit. Try these products yourself, but the only place you’ll see a change is in your wallet.
We will discuss hormonal optimization in more detail later.
For now, remember that any hormonal manipulation you attempt should meet the following key standards:
1. The treatment should never violate the Negative Inhibi-tory Feedback Loop (NIFBL), that is, the treatment should address the issue at the regulatory point, not at the end hor-mone point.
2. The treatment should never exceed physiological parameters, that is, it should never drive the hormonal cascade into an extreme range. If you adhere to standard No. 1, No. 2 will never be an issue.
3. The treatment should always respect the innate balance of all the hormones and their relative interdependence, while eliciting an optimization of not one but all the various hormones.
4. The treatment should elicit the natural endogenous (your body’s own) hormones to come into play without introduc-ing any end hormone into the system (see standard No. 1).
5. The end result of treatment should mimic the body’s natural response and respect the body’s endogenous rhythms of the hormonal cycles.