Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (14 page)

By contrast, French women are among the healthiest on the planet. They are not as plagued with cancer and menopausal symptoms as we are here in America. They take fewer pharmaceutical drugs than we do, probably because they shop daily for fresh food and eat quality food. In Europe (France included) doctors first try to heal homeopathically and then prescribe pharmaceuticals as a last resort, plus they have been using bioidentical hormones for fifty years. In America we immediately go to pharmaceutical drugs for the slightest problem. We can now see that all these chemicals and drugs that we have taken and exposed ourselves to without thinking have been a prescription for disease. We are sick as a result, and getting sicker all the time. We have to stop this insanity now.

As men lose their hormones, they get grumpy and big bellies. They don’t want to go out so much anymore. They start to check out. They lose vitality. Their muscles start to shrink. Along comes the risk for prostate cancer, which is the male equivalent to breast cancer. As their hormone levels decline, men begin to see a rise in their prostate-specific antigen (PSA) tests. A new theory, though one not shared by all doctors, is that putting back a man’s lost hormones will quash prostate problems. It’s worth looking into instead of the male nullification that the main prostate drug, Lupron, has to offer. In its life-debilitating effects, Lupron for men is similar to tamoxifen for women. Both mess with your hormones.

The change we notice in a man’s energy is so normal as they age that we have come to accept this as the way it is, but the entire scenario can be rectified and reversed for men who choose hormone replacement. Men get to feel better, look better, have more energy, and build muscle. The benefits of BHRT to their hearts, brain, and ability to prevent cancer are astounding.

Lifestyle habits such as bad diet, lack of exercise, overuse of stimulants, stress, and smoking all elevate levels of insulin and will lead to increased risk of heart disease and cancer. The reason excessive body fat is linked to cancer is that elevated insulin levels cause excessive body fat, rapid cell growth, and an imbalance in every other hormone system of the body. When hormones are imbalanced, the possibility of abnormal cell division (cancer) increases.

For years, the medical profession advised people to eat a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. This advice has been problematic, however. You need fats in your diet. Real fats—butter, cream, sour cream, full-fat cream cheese, and olive oil—are essential building blocks for your cells. They are essential for the production of hormones, and hormones regulate normal cell division and keep your immune system functioning. Every cell in your body requires protein, fat, and carbohydrate to reproduce itself. Think about it: As human beings, we are a bundle of
cells reproducing
. That is how we stay alive. So does it make any sense to avoid one of the essential elements of the makeup of a cell? By avoiding fats, people were left defenseless against cancer-cell growth. Remember, abnormal division of cells is the definition of cancer. So if you are avoiding one of the building blocks (fats) of the makings of a cell, there is no way a cell can reproduce properly. The low-fat movement was a big mistake, and it partly caused the alarming rise of cancers for those who adopted this way of eating. Yet today patients are still being advised to go off fats.

I see similar bad advice all the time in the treatment of diabetes as well. The standard advice to the diabetic is to avoid sugar, which is good advice, and to also avoid fat, which is incorrect advice. The correct advice for a diabetic (or anyone, for that matter) should be to avoid sugar and to avoid
fake
fats: trans fats, hydrogenated oils, and
anything that comes in a bag or a box. These packaged foods are what I call “cancer in a box.”

The body can’t handle any more chemicals. This point is essential to understand for survival; it’s that serious. Besides, what is better than butter, cream, or cheese? I think of all the years I ate margarine because I was trying to do something good for myself—what a waste! I always tell my readers to shop the periphery of the supermarket. That’s where they keep the real food—meat, chicken, fish, dairy, fruits, and vegetables.

Although no one really knows where cancer comes from, whether it’s diet or something else, the best prevention is to keep your hormones balanced. In fact, the doctors I have interviewed for this book all concur that the best prevention for the diseases of aging is balanced bioidentical hormone replacement. Think about it: Young people, with their full complement of hormones, rarely get cancer, heart disease, or Alzheimer’s disease.

In this chapter, I don’t want to delve into those diseases specifically, because you’ll “hear” the doctors in this book talk about them and how they’re related to hormonal loss. Mainly I want to talk about some of the effects of aging that you may be experiencing (and that I experienced): age-related conditions and illnesses like gastrointestinal (GI) problems, osteoporosis, and hysterectomy.

GI T
RACT:
W
HY
A
M
I B
LOATED?

Bloating, bloating, bloating! Do you know one woman who doesn’t complain about bloating? It starts around age forty. Your once flat stomach now looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy’s. You feel that if someone stuck a pin in your stomach, all the air would come out. It is uncomfortable. Not only that, nothing fits when you are bloated, and bloating makes you look ten pounds heavier.

It is extremely important to understand that the GI tract can be healed, and eating well is the largest component of fixing the problem. With the help of a qualified doctor who specializes in the GI
tract, you must identify the foods that you are allergic to. All of us have foods that we are unable to process. When you know what they are and avoid them, the problem begins to dissipate. There is a test you can take to help identify foods that offend you. If your doctor is not aware of this test, you can find information about it by going to Dr. Diana Schwarzbein’s website at
www.schwarzbeinprinciple.com
.

Another major factor in GI problems is stress, which can partly be resolved through adequate sleep. Thus, if you can get eight to nine hours of sleep each night, you can go a long way toward ridding yourself of uncomfortable bloating. When you get a full night’s sleep, the release of melatonin lowers your body temperature, and this, in turn, kills off the bad bacteria in your gut. Exercise (with the right type of exercise for your current metabolism) is also vital for relieving stress.

There are other measures you can take: Avoiding chemicals to self-medicate is helpful. It is also necessary to recolonize your intestines regularly and daily with acidophilus. The culture in acidophilus puts back the friendly flora and helps to restore balance. As you will read in Dr. Prudence Hall’s chapter, she first gets the “bugs” out of the intestinal tract before she recolonizes. Recently I had to take antibiotics, which in the past have always given me a yeast infection. This time I took acidophilus like candy, two and three times a day, and I never got a yeast infection.

If you are taking bioidentical hormones, it is important to take them correctly. (See
chapter 5
for guidelines.) They should mimic your normal physiology, meaning that you are trying to replicate the hormones you made naturally in your younger years when you were completely balanced. If you remember, when you were young and balanced hormonally, bloating was not even an issue. It is not until we start losing our hormones in the aging process, coupled with a lifetime of antibiotics (unnecessary in so many cases), that the bacteria in the gut finally go on overload.

B
ONES AND
O
STEOPOROSIS

It’s pretty crazy that we don’t realize that osteoporosis, a bone-thinning disease, is rectifiable and in some cases reversible with bioidentical hormone replacement. Think about it: Did you have weak and fragile bones when you were young? No! The reason you didn’t is that your hormones were perfectly balanced. But hear this: Bone loss is not a condition that has to accompany middle to old age.

At menopause, we begin to worry about and even expect bone loss. Since most of us have already started to experience some bone loss at this point, our doctors order bone density tests. Osteoporosis is insidious because you can’t see or feel what is happening. Most people who have the disease don’t know it. And then a bone breaks.

Each year, half a million Americans wind up in the hospital because of fractures related to osteoporosis. Hip fractures, which represent about three hundred thousand of that total, are devastating. One victim in five dies within a year, and half are never able to live independently again. Most of us know someone who has suffered a hip fracture, but you may be surprised to learn that complications of this injury kill even more women every year than breast cancer. Preventing osteoporosis is really a life-and-death matter, like preventing cancer and heart disease.

Hip fractures are just the most obvious part of the problem. Millions of women suffer distressing symptoms that they don’t connect to fragile bones. A woman may not realize that her chronic back pain comes from little crush fractures in her spine. Ever felt a shooting pain in your back as you bent to pick up something? If you are experiencing bone loss, each one of those sharp pains could be fractures happening in your spine. Fragile vertebrae can gradually crumble under the ordinary stresses of everyday life. Osteoporosis can make a woman look old before her time. She may have no idea that her slumped posture and protruding stomach are caused by fractures in her spine. As a woman, your odds are one in three of suffering from osteoporosis in your lifetime. You can beat those odds through bioidentical hormone replacement given in the correct ratio and balance.

Osteoporosis affects women eight times more than men. One in two women over age fifty will suffer at least one lifetime fracture from osteoporosis. When we run out of estrogen and progesterone, our bones start to die very quickly. Bones have their own life cycle or metabolism. According to author T. S. Wiley, “A rhythm of growth and death governed by estrogen and progesterone is the falloff of estrogen in perimenopause, which means there is no peak of estrogen activity to make progesterone receptors that would build bone. This is the beginning of osteoporosis.”

She goes on to say: “Estrogen controls osteoclast activity. Osteoclasts are bone cells that eat up old bone for disposal. Progesterone controls osteoblastic activity. Osteoblasts are bone cells that build fresh new bone. Progesterone, in this case, grows bone, and estrogen takes it away so that new bone can grow again next month. Without this balanced interplay, one of two things can happen: Without estrogen, bone would overgrow into a cancerlike state, or without progesterone, unopposed estrogen [taking estrogen only every day] would make bones thin, fragile, and porous … in other words, osteoporotic.”

This process gets confusing. Estrogen is prescribed for menopausal women, and it does help with osteoporosis for a little while because it prevents apoptosis—that is, the birth, death, and rebirth of cells. (A good way to understand apoptosis is through our monthly periods: We build a lining, slough off a lining [bleed], and then rebuild a lining again for next month, in hopes of making a baby. Every cell in our body goes through this apoptosis every month.) However, estrogen prevents apoptosis in the bone-building cells, the osteoblasts. Unless progesterone comes in to
stimulate
osteoblasts, not much bone grows from estrogen replacement alone.

Basically, it is the decline in three hormones—estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone—and not just estrogen, that causes bones to become thinner and more brittle. Evidence suggests that bioidentical hormone replacement therapy can help slow down osteoporosis, and in some cases, it will reverse bone loss in women. Ten years ago, I was experiencing bone loss. Today, after a decade of replacement, I have reversed the loss. With a full BHRT regimen, including HGH, bone loss reversal is possible for most women.

Unfortunately, though, there are two synthetic drugs given to women with osteoporosis: Fosamax and raloxifene. Fosamax prevents the osteoclasts from doing their job of breaking down bone. There are no long-term studies on Fosamax, but a drug that interferes with the cycle of bone growth can’t be good. It is not natural. It is a drug.

Raloxifene blocks estrogen in an attempt to slow down bone degradation. Its side effects are similar to those of tamoxifen, including menopausal hot flashes and vision changes.

Bioidentical hormone replacement can do what none of the drugs can do: revive your bones. In other words, taking bioidentical hormones in the correct ratio and rhythm prevents osteoporosis. That’s all we want. Other crucial ways to keep strong, healthy bones include exercising, light weight lifting, and following a healthy diet. Calcium helps some, but taking vitamin D with your calcium can affect you dramatically. Vitamin D is needed to absorb calcium and turn it into bone.

Men are also prone to osteoporosis, and an estimated 2 million men already have this disease. In fact, a man is more likely to suffer an osteoporosis-related fracture during his lifetime than he is to get prostate cancer. Most men, and even their doctors in some cases, are unaware of this problem.

Low testosterone levels are responsible for about half the cases of osteoporosis in men. When a man shows symptoms of low testosterone—low libido, decreased facial and body hair, enlarged breasts—it’s time to get his bones checked. There are many men who have low testosterone with no symptoms at all, however. But the point is that hormonal stimulation and balance are just as important for men’s bones as it is for women’s.

Men with a light frame and low body weight, as well as men with eating disorders, are particularly at risk for osteoporosis. So are competitive athletes in sports with weight classifications. Anyone who has been a yo-yo dieter or had anorexia or bulimia is at a higher risk for osteoporosis. Other risk factors for men and women are inactivity, high alcohol consumption, and smoking (current or past).