Hormone Harmony: Leading a Healthier Lifestyle

 

 

 

BodyLogicMD Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Alicia Stanton was recently interviewed on Health Talk Radio with host Dr. Derrick De Silva, discussing the role that hormones play in our overall health.

Dr. Stanton talks about her new book Hormone Harmony: How to Balance Insulin, Cortisol, Thyroid, Estrogen, Progesterone and Testosterone to Live Your Best Life and explains how women and men can live better, longer, through lifestyle changes and by balancing hormones.

Dr. Stanton also discusses the different forms of hormonal imbalance, such as perimenopause, menopause, andropause (the male menopause), thyroid disorders and stress-induced adrenal fatigue and how they typically affect women and men. In addition, Dr. Stanton gives a brief overview of some of the body's key hormones such as estrogen, cortisol (the stress hormone), testosterone and progesterone and explains their function in the human body and how they can impact our overall health.

Hormones aren't the only factor. Diet, environment, lifestyle and stress can also contribute to a long list of health challenges oftentimes associated with aging. Dr. Stanton offers expert advice on what women and men can do to safeguard themselves from hormonal imbalance, improve their lives and achieve optimal health and wellness.

Listen to Dr. Stanton on Health Radio

TRANSCRIPT:

HOST: Hello, hello, hello, welcome back. Thank you very much for joining us. Folks one of the biggest issues I see happening right now is the whole idea of the perimenopausal and menopausal woman and the man in his early mid to late 50's and early 60's going through what is called andropause. So menopause and andropause, huge issues as the baby boomers are coming to bloom if your will in this country. Our next guest is Dr. Alicia Staton, she is the chief medical officer for an organization called BodyLogicMD and she's the author of the book Hormone Harmony, she joins us on the program today to talk about hormones and the importance of balancing hormones as we get older. Dr. Stanton welcome to the program.

 

Dr. Stanton: Thank you for having me.

 

HOST: My pleasure. Hormone Harmony, what a great name, explain that to us.

 

Dr. Stanton: Essentially the premise of Hormone Harmony is that all of our hormones, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, thyroid, DHEA-they all work together and one of my great teachers taught me that the hormones are in a symphony. If the violins are off in one direction and the flutes are in another, the symphony doesn't come together. I really took Hormone Harmony from that concept in thinking that we really need to have everything well in balance for everything in the body to work well.

 

HOST: I'm so glad you mentioned the thyroid and all of those because personally I really believe that the thyroid is one of the most important endocrine glands within the body that controls so much of what goes on in our body. You're allowed to disagree with me here, agree?disagree, what is your feeling on that?

 

Dr. Stanton: I wholeheartedly agree that the thyroid and the adrenal that connects and is crucial. Our population as a whole are really having major problems because of our stress levels, because of our diets, throw off our adrenals and the thyroid. I think that's where we're seeing the fatigue and the weight gain. People don't realize the foggy thinking, the sleep issues, dry skin, hair loss, all kinds of different things can be related to those hormones.

 

HOST: We can fix the thyroid. That is in my opinion is very easy to fix. What about the adrenals, what do you do about the adrenals?

 

Dr. Stanton: It's very interesting because my motto is: "Fix the adrenals first". It's one of these things that the thyroid is east to fix, but if you have someone that you don't pick up an adrenal fatigue, you can actually?I don't know if you've ever had a patient where, you know clearly that it is a hyper-thyroid, and you've tried them on thyroid medication and then they are all racy and hyper. Their adrenals are suppressed and they can't handle thyroid.

 

HOST: What do you do, what do you do?

 

Dr. Stanton: What I do with them is first of all, tell them it's a long standing problem and it's going to take a little while. We do a number of different things, we focus on diet, we have them eating every two to three hours lean protein like chicken, nuts, fish, turkey, beans and a complex carbohydrate like a vegetable or a fruit so their keeping their blood sugar stable, that's number one. Number two we look at stressors, we look at lifestyles and we fix those issues. Number three, we utilize adaptogenic herbs with rhodiola, ashuaganda, ginseng to try to help balance the adrenals out.

 

HOST: Let me ask you a question before I forget this. When we us adaptogens, and I want to get back to what adaptogens are, do you give them throughout the day? How do you use things like rhodiola and ginseng, ashuaganda throughout the day?

 

Dr. Stanton: I do not tend to use them throughout the course of the day. If someone has low adrenals, and I'm trying to bring them up a little bit, I tend to back off on some of them toward the later afternoon or evening, so we don't have any sleep issues. However, if they tend to have higher adrenals, you can use some of these adaptogens with pulsatile serene. It lowers the evening cortisol so it makes it easier for them to sleep. It is important to know what their adrenals are doing. Are they very low, or are they hyper and then adjusting their herbs appropriately.

 

HOST: What are adaptogens by the way?

 

Dr. Stanton: Adaptogens are herbs that really help to normalize the level of an organ. When we talk about the adrenals we're talking about the fact that the adrenals create the stress hormone cortisol. Your cortisol levels can be very, very high if you're stressed or if you've been stressed for a long time and your adrenals are starting to be fatigued it can be very low. Adaptogens function to take high level of cortisol and bring them down to normal or take low levels of cortisol and bring them up to normal.

 

HOST: Folks, that is the key of what Dr. Stanton just said. Adaptogens normalize body function. These are what are called soft acting plants, their non-toxic, their fast acting and phenomenal. If you don't know anything about them, you really need to do some reading about them. Eating every two hours to keep your blood sugar maintained, life style you said is important, adaptogens you said were important. What else?

 

Dr. Stanton: Different vitamin supplementation. We really focus we the adrenals on the C vitamins, the B vitamins, those are really very nurturing for the adrenals. You need to make sure you have a good supply of those vitamins as well. If you're in real dire straits, I've had patients come in who are so adrenally exhausted that they literally can't get out of bed. I had one patient who was literally on her way to the Brabadore Retreat, which is a psychiatric area because she thought she was losing her mind. We did her testing and she was just depleted. For those patients I will add a little bit of cortisol, bioidentical cortisol to help them until they can move through on their own.

 

HOST: How do you test? What do you do?

 

Dr. Stanton: For adrenals, actually one of the best ways to look at what we call diurnal rhythm. At various points during the day, what is your actual cortisol level? One of the best ways to do it and the way NASA does it, is with saliva. The reason is that saliva has the same make-ups as the fluid around your cells. It's an easy way to get a sample of what's happening to your adrenals at four points in one day. If you think about trying to give blood for the particular arena then first of all you have to go to the lab four times in one day and that's going to create stress. Secondly, anyone coming at you with needles is going to make your cortisol level go up.

 

HOST: Exactly, I check the cortisol level four times a day like you said. What is cortisol and how should that pattern look like by the way?

 

Dr. Stanton: Cortisol is our stress hormone our fighter flight hormone. It is the hormone that allows us to react to a potential crisis. It raises our heart rate, raises our blood sugar and raises our blood pressure; it makes us more alert and able to handle a crisis. Normally, after the crises it comes down, but we tend to be living in constant crisis mode. The normal pattern for cortisol is the highest in the morning; actually that cortisol elevation is what helps us wake up in the morning. It tends to go down a little bit more at noon, morning-afternoon, and lowest in the evening. One of the things I tell patients who are waking up during the middle of the night and their mind is racing or their mind is going, we talk about the fact that sometimes a small evening snack of a lean protein and a complex carbohydrate will keep their blood sugar stable, because if their blood sugar drops during the middle of the night, that's going to be a stress on the body and is going to trigger an increase in cortisol and that's going to wake them up because their body is going to think it's 7:00 in the morning.

 

HOST: Right, right and this is something that we see all the time, instead of giving them a bunch of drugs, which is going to heighten the situation and make it all worse. What about andropause? What about the male menopause issue?

 

Dr. Stanton: What's interesting with the andropause, the male menopause, is that I think it's a very real entity. Men have the testosterone levels go down a slower rate and its different physiology, obviously with women, their ovaries stop producing eggs and stop cycling and that's menopause. For men, it's just a slow decline in testosterone production. The real crisis that we are seeing though is that because of the toxins that we have in our plastics and a lot of different things like that, our diets and our stress levels, we're having our guys start losing their testosterone much more quickly. What really startled me in the past month I saw a study that said that one out of five men under the age of forty has low testosterone.

 

HOST: I'm not surprised. I have seen this in my practice. Have you seen that in your practice?

 

Dr. Stanton: I've see really amazing cases where these guys are exhausted, nothing's working, and everyone offers them the little erectile disfunction pill and an anti-depressant, but nobody will look at their testosterone and help them raise that up. It was an interesting myth they were talking about with the baseball players that have these lipid profiles that are out of whack and bad cholesterols. One of the things testosterone helps you do is normalize your cholesterol. That's a whole other talk, but I wouldn't be surprised if half of those guys have very low testosterone.

 

HOST: I can't wait to have you back.

 

Dr. Stanton: Thank you.

 

HOST: I cannot wait to have you back; in fact we're going to book a whole show so we can really get into this. By the way a folk, the book is Hormone Harmony, HormoneHarmony.org, BodyLogicMD.com.

 

Dr. Stanton: HarmoneHarmony.org and BodyLogicMD.com that's great.

 

HOST: Very good.