A brief exploration of the diverse health effects of diet, lifestyle and environmental toxic exposure on women’s health

By: Dr Nigma Talib, ND
Naturopathic Doctor

Hormone Balancing for Women

The essence of who your patients are, how they think, how they feel emotionally, physically and mentally, is all wrapped up in the balance and symphony of hormones. Hormone activity in the body can be described as the interplay of various instruments in an orchestra that produces beautifully balanced music; if one instrument is out of tune, it can throw off the entire orchestra. The body’s hormones are interrelated, each performing a unique biological function which controls bone density, weight, mood, metabolism, reproduction and cognitive function just like the instruments in the orchestra. Any disturbances in hormonal functions in the body could cause illness in one or all of these areas of health.

Throughout a woman’s life, the flow of hormonal changes from day to day and year to year will dictate how much quality of life she will have. At high levels, a hormone may have a completely different effect than at low levels and sometimes the symptoms can be the same for high and low hormonal levels. The proper levels and amounts of various hormones are the foundation to optimal female health.

The result of hormonal imbalances includes a host of disease states such as hypothyroidism, adrenal insufficiency, PMS, endometriosis, ovarian cysts, infertility, unpleasant menopausal symptoms, poor blood sugar control, chronic fatigue and premature aging. Lastly, the rates and incidents of women complaining of anxiety, heart palpitations, insomnia and night sweats have increased as well. These are all signs and symptoms of the hormonal imbalances that affect our female patients.

Naturopathic Medicine believes that female hormonal imbalance is a direct result of poor nutrient food intake, poor diet choices, chronic stress, a lack of physical activity and an accumulation of toxic substances that enter our body everyday.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Nutrient poor and artificial food choices for diet alone in the Western world have created imbalances in hormone levels. The Western diet includes high intakes of the “bad foods” and low intake of the “good foods”. The “bad foods” tend to be highly refined, processed foods comprising ingredients such as white sugar, artificial sweeteners, white flour, preservatives, colours, additives, pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, hormones and hormone disruptors.

The “good foods” on the other hand which are fruits and vegetables are only consumed in small amounts. According to surveys done by the American Dietetic Association only 14% of Americans consumed at least five servings of fruits and vegetables per day. Furthermore, The World Cancer Research Fund published a report illustrating the benefits of these particular foods, indicating that consumption of at least five servings a day of fruit and vegetables was associated with a 50% reduced risk for cancer.

It has been more than fifty years since there has been an introduction of toxic chemicals into our environment; these chemicals were to provide us with greater productivity and efficiency. There are serious questions we must ask about the ever growing use of chemicals in our environment; are these chemicals creating more harm than good?
The truth is, that today, more than 70,000 synthetic chemicals are used commercially and approximately a thousand more new chemicals are introduced into our environment each year. These harmful environmental toxins are damaging our reproductive health and disrupting our delicate hormone balance.
In addition to other toxic chemicals, these substances all contain xenoestrogens (also known as 16-hydroxy estrogen or “foreign oestrogens”), which are the “bad oestrogens” that are able to enter your oestrogen-receptor tissues and form cysts in various parts of the body. In other words, xenoestrogens or “foreign oestrogens” are toxins that mimic female hormones sending the wrong messages to various oestrogen receptor sites thereby creating potentially life threatening cystic changes in the body. These xenohormones are found almost everywhere in the environment; they are found in plastics, car exhausts, industrial wastes, carpeting and a host of other sources that are absorbed into the body through the soil, food and air.
Our environment is making us sick and we are not only seeing the incidence of breast and ovarian cancer rates increase but overall cancer rates are increasing. The World Cancer Report, released by The World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2003 states that cancer rates could rise to an alarming 15 million cases with nine million deaths a year by 2020. The incidence of endometriosis has never been higher and dioxin exposure is clearly linked to cancer and is potentially a cause of endometriosis.
Further disturbing research about our polluted world is that the study of the umbilical cords of newborns revealed the presence of approximately 100 synthetic chemicals.
Inactivity, Stress and Hormones
You may have witnessed that most of your female patients ages 45 to 50 complain about weight gain. Based on this information, can we infer that perimenopausal (the years surrounding menopause) weight gain is inescapable? No, this is not the case. Women do not inevitably gain weight with menopause and there are actions that can be taken to prevent this. Yes, with age women commonly gain weight and get a thickened waist as fat settles in the abdominal area. However, these changes are not due to the hormonal shifts of menopause alone, but rather how a reduced metabolic rate, less physical activity and calorie imbalance impacts hormonal function.

Furthermore, as women age they tend to lose muscle mass (unless they do regular strength training exercises). Since muscle drives your metabolic rate and burns fat, less muscle means a lower metabolic rate and fewer calories burned. Compound the latter with chronic stress, and your patients will feel chronically fatigued and complain about fat around the belly also known as the “spare tyre”. This ongoing state of stress inevitably leads to poor sleep habits, creating a vicious cycle that further drives hormonal shifts towards elevated cortisol and imbalanced blood sugar.
Cortisol and Stress
Cortisol is elevated in response to stress. The hormone cortisol is produced in the adrenal cortex in response to adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH) produced in the pituitary gland. Cortisol plays an important role in regulating blood sugar, energy production, inflammation, the immune system and healing.

If you have too little cortisol, you may suffer from fatigue, chronic fatigue, exhaustion and a disease of the endocrine system called Addison’s disease.

If your adrenal glands are producing too much cortisol, you may develop conditions such as weight gain, especially around the abdomen, depressed immune function with all of the consequences, accelerated aging and stomach ulcers.

The effects of excess cortisol on weight gain creates an environment in the body where it is extremely difficult to lose weight no matter what diet your patient is taking or how much they are exercising. You will have a failure rate of approximately 95 percent if you do not address your patients adrenal gland dysfunction.

Conclusion
Thankfully your patients do not have to live with hormonally related health problems that impact their overall quality of life; something can be done about it. Effectively treating hormone issues requires looking at the whole person and her unique story. The final effect of any hormone is the balance of all of your hormones. No hormone acts by itself. It is a symphony that is either in harmony or is discordant.
We can now assess our patients with the correct tools in the form of functional testing to identify and create proper diets, hormonal balancing programs and proper lifestyle recommendations. Salivary, urinary and blood hormonal assessments go above and beyond conventional testing to identify the problems in hormone balance and metabolism. As practitioners, it is important that we perform the correct assessments that are unique to our patients in order to reproduce personalised diets and lifestyle modifications. In addition, we must act as “biochemical detectives” where we help our patients correct the hormonal imbalances through quality supplementation of natural remedies that are safe and effective.

REFERENCES
Cavalieri E, Rogan E, Chakravarti D. Initiation of cancer and other diseases by catechol ortho-quinones: a unifying mechanism. Cell Mol Life Sci 2002; 59: 665-681
Cushman M, Legault C, Barrett-Connor E, et al. Effect of postmenopausal hormones on inflammation-sensitive proteins. The postmenopausal estrogen/progestin interventions (PEPI) study. Circ 1999; 100: 717-722
Houlihan et al “Body Burden: The Pollution in Newborns,” Environmental Working Group, July 14, 2005

Scott L, Salahuddin F, Cooney J, et al. Differences in adrenal steroid profile in chronic fatigue syndrome, in depression and in health. J Affect Disord 1999; 54: 129-137
Ursin G. et al. Reproductive factors and risk of breast carcinoma in a study of white and African-American women. Cancer. 2004 Jul 15; 101(2): 353-62

B vitamin may lower Blood pressure says a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition on January 25, 2012.

Researchers in Northern Ireland found that in Vitamin B2 (riboflavin) in both men and women who carried the gene mutation that puts them at risk for a elevated homocysteine and blood pressure level benefited from small amounts of this B vitamin per day over a 16 week trial.

Blood pressure was seen to be reduced in patients with the genetically at-risk group who received riboflavin, both systolic and diastolic blood pressure by an average of
and 6.0 mm Hg respectively.