Balancing Act: Understanding Hormones Through Every Stage of Life

Introduction and sponsor note 0:00

From your cycle through menopause and beyond, women's hormones shape energy, mood, sleep, and overall health. You're listening to the Get to The Root podcast with hope for healing. Today, Dr. Paula Kruppstadt unpacks the key hormones that impact women health throughout every stage of life. How toxins and stress can disrupt balance and what functional medicine can do to support lasting wellness. As a reminder, this podcast is for education and encouragement. Please consult your healthcare provider for personalized medical advice.

Let's get to the root together. But first, a note from Dr. K about our sponsor. Our hormones guide us through every stage of life, from adolescence through menopause and beyond. Genetics play a key role in how well they function. And that's where our partnership with Fagran makes a difference. Their genetic panels reveal how the body metabolizes hormones, detoxifies them, and responds to environmental toxins, giving us a clearer path So Dr. K, one of the biggest things we get asked about is hormones.

It is probably one of the hottest topics that we touch on. And so I thought, what better way to kind of put all of our discussion or at least some of discussion in one place about women's health and hormones?

Key hormones across a womanu2019s life 1:32

So first off, before we kind get into the nitty gritty, can we just talk a little of a bigger picture? What are the major hormones that influence women health? Well, estrogen, and there's three different types, then progesterone and testosterone and DA, those are very important. But the drivers, many times too, of metabolism and hormones, you have to think about the thyroid gland. It's a hormone-producing organ in our neck, and then the brain tells a lot of these hormones to be made in the adrenal gland, our thyroid gland and those kind of things.

So how do you, and maybe just this is again a bigger topic, but how can we briefly go over how hormones shift throughout women's life specifically? Right. So when we think about young girls, they're estrogen dominant. and meaning that their body is not cycling yet. And then when you approach the age of menstruation, you have the follicular phase of the cycle and the luteal phase. So the fullicular phases is you a menstrual cycle, and then your body preparing to release the contents of an egg for potential fertilization.

And then once you ovulate, you have the luteal phase, and then the body is preparing for the endometrium, the lining of the uterus, to be able to have implantation of an embryo. So progesterone is what women need in the luteal phase of their cycle, and that's where you look at for fertility. And then when you approach perimenopause and then eventually menopaus, you stop having a menstrual cycle and you want to maintain some levels of hormones. Progesterone for a woman is very much like testosterone for men.

It helps them with decision making and joy in life. And our society is so toxic that we disrupt the normal flow of hormones and our food supply is disrupted that the goal is to provide the body into menopause and postmenopausal so that there's adequate amounts of progesterone and estrogen and testosterone to maintain bone density, your brain working with the estrogen receptors everywhere. It should be a seamless thing where there shouldn't be summertime moments like night sweats. But that's kind of the ages and phases and stages of a woman's life.

Pre-menstruation, menstruation.

Endocrine disruptors in children and adults 4:46

Parry around menopause, menoppause and postmenopausal. That's amazing. Well, and thank you for breaking it down because you touched on the big thing is that I think so frequently we hit these stages. You kind of talk about endocrine disruptors a lot and you start the endocrine disruptor talk not even when we're talking about adults, you started with children and that there are things that can be brought up in young children that could start these cycles earlier or make them harder than they should be.

Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, you know, when we think about there's something called precocious puberty or children who have foul body odor at a young age. So when were looking at the body's ability to properly metabolize hormones, And if there's signs and symptoms that something's not working right or you have advanced puberty, you to make sure there is nothing going on in the brain, like a brain tumor producing hormones. But if not, when you look at what you put on your body, basic care products, that's very important.

And we always refer to an app called ewg.org, and there another one called the Dirty App. but you want to avoid putting profound amounts on the skin of children of lavender oil and tea tree oil. Now, diffusing here and there because there's benefits, but too much too often. For example, in boys, you can have impaired production of testosterone shutting down and making a lot more estrogen byproducts, and that's where you walk around and you see these young men with moobs, man boobs, okay? And it can happen very early on.

A big thing, too, in our environment is microplastics. Using a toothbrush that is an electric toothbrush with plastic bristles instead of moving over to, say, boar's hair bristles. for tooth brushing. So plastics, these things you put on your body, and so personal care products, they've done a good job of removing carcinogens from hand sanitizers, but hand sanitisers blend into endocrine disruption too. When we talk about lifestyle changes that parents can do, you want to be able to sweat. And children and adults, but especially children, need to be able to sweat.

And by giving what we call cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, carrots, garlic, brussels sprouts, those foods are very, very good at helping the liver work and detoxify. They have something in them called sulforthane and mustard. We call them brassica vegetables like broccoli brassaca. So that helps clean out the body. And you really also need to have really good bowel movements because if you're plugged up and you reabsorb broken down hormones that your body's releasing, that can lend to endocrine disruption too.

And so I know you mentioned that it's really important for children, but could that help people who are experiencing that in their 30s, 20s older? So is this an overall helpful benefit? Yes, this is incredibly helpful across the ages and stages. Honestly, the toxic load that our body is under is causing some of these really big issues. I want to go through two different areas. First and foremost, I wanna know I know we get these questions a lot when people are either struggling with fertility, which is such a hard journey, or when they are experiencing severe and really life-halting like perimenopause and menopausal symptoms, like that they just, and they're being told this is a fact of life.

So I want to look at this from two different ways. One, what are things that we could be looking for before it gets that bad? Are there things Great question. So in functional medicine, we talk about the gut. Why? It's considered the second brain. And everything that comes through our body and the things that we absorb or fail to absorb within our gut impact ovarian health, impact hormone health.

Gut health, constipation, and flax for hormone balance 9:35

eliminating toxic poison products in the food that you eat. It's so important to be able to have a stable, good daily bowel movement, if not three a day, okay, depending on the amount of fruits and vegetables. And let's face it, our society sets us up for being bound up and constipated on-the-run not drinking water, but drinking soda and plugging ourselves up. So if you're going to want to mitigate or prevent a lot of these things, you have to be able to prepare the gut to absorb nutrients. And if you're chronically constipated, you can't do that.

Even if do poop every day, if don't eat quality. What I'm talking about is real fruits and vegetables, poultry, fish, wild caught fish and grass fed beef and bison and those kind of things, but fruits and vegetables that should be organic so it's the quality of what you put in so that the nutrients that you absorb are appropriate. So if you lack all these essential vitamins and minerals and you've had a life of chronic diarrhea or chronic constipation and then treating the gut is paramount. So something you actually talk about, which I literally have just put together all together, is you'll talk when it comes to constipation and how flax is really good.

But then, well, also, whenever you're trying to get rid of junk estrogen, you talk how fax is good! So can you tell us a little bit about what happens when we have flax and what kind of fax we should be looking for to help both sides of those things? Right. So organic flax seeds that are freshly ground have something called lignans, and you don't want to buy it ground, okay? And another thing is you put it in your freezer, you take it out, maybe put in a little coffee grinder that's just for seeds.

The fiber helps you poop, okay, but the lignans, the freshly ground flax, absorbs toxic forms of estrogen in the gut so that you don't recirculate it. So food as medicine, it's a foundation of functional medicine. That's why freshly-ground flex is so good for you. I love that. So one of the things that we always talk about a lot is genetics. There is not a single patient or person that, we don't think, is in need of having their genetics either understood or taken. And so when it comes to women's hormone function and hormone health, What kind of SNPs or genetics would we look into to help them optimize?

Or maybe they have weighted and they are in a place where they're constantly having hot flashes or they struggling with infertility. Can we talk a lot about where genetics plays a role in this? Yeah, that's a great question or a good thing to key off into is that you look at how your body is unable to cool down inflammation. But specifically when you're diving into hormones, you want to know how the cells clean themselves out. That's called autophagy. So if you build up debris in your cells, you might be one of those kids that smells bad pre-pubescent and pubescents and has severe dysmenorrhea if your female or develop moods.

But then detoxification, which is global, the liver, kidneys, skin, lungs, we look at that too. But there's also some hormone receptors, like something called box E1, it tells you how much selenium and iodine you have. and it'll predispose you to potential autoimmune thyroid disease. So when you look at just the symphony of our bodies, looking at these precision genetics, but specifically like PCOS, infertility,

Genetics, detoxification, and hormone dysfunction 14:02

autophagy is at the root of that. You have to look then the detoxification, you want to give your body glutathione or cruciferous vegetables or a supplement that has the equivalent of three pounds of 2DL broccoli sprouts in it to clean out your liver and your gut. So that's where the genetics, that is where you start. Inflammation, then cleaning the cells out and then moving the debris out of the body. There's also hormone markers, but that's kind of where I would start. Amazing. And I think that is the beautiful thing.

I thin sometimes people feel like we can be a victim to our circumstances or we've just been completely blown off, which I feel Dr. K, you can even touch on a little bit of your story where You were really struggling and then you were a doctor going to other doctors for support and help. And then, you are just treated like it was all in your head or it just stress and not that stress can't impact hormones. They really can, but that doesn't mean that we can give our bodies the support they can to deal with the stress that were under.

Could you talk a little bit about that and your experience that led you? I'd be happy to and it's a vulnerable moment but I used to have a lot of shame around this because as an MD to admit that you were struggling with these things but it is part of my story and everyone's story is different and that's the beauty of functional medicine and most functional practitioners have their own story so for me My cholesterol was elevated, bad family history, and I chose to go on a statin after the birth of my fourth child.

I made a conscious decision not to breastfeed because I was so convinced that if my cholesterol went up too rapidly or I couldn't get it down, that I could have a heart attack based on my family's history. So number one, I didn't breastfeed my fourth child, that now I'm just grieving over that, but it's over and it is done. Second, six weeks into taking a statin drug, I started having these terrible images, grabbing a knife and stabbing myself with it. And I went to my internist and told him, and he looked at me and said, really?

And, like, do you think I am lying? I just told you my deepest, darkest shame and you're gaslighting me. And so at that point in time, it was an aha moment where I decided there has to be a better way. So I made a conscious decision to, number one, never go back to that medical provider. Number two, pursue alternative care. Because I struggled with depression, because statins decrease bioavailable hormones and give you the energy that you need. And they're mitochondrial toxins. Oh, by the way, when you open up your package insert, there's a black box warning about mitochondria toxins, we know that can drive down cholesterol and LDL with other things that are not going to impact your mitochondrion.

and lead to freaking suicidal ideation, which, oh, by the way, when you look in the list of potential side effects, it's down there in 1% to 2%. I bet it is a lot more because people have so much shame associated with it and they don't know, and then they get put on an antidepressant, Oh, I took 27 years of antidespressants, 11 to 13, no one looked for the root cause. Because I dealt with depression, also, I went to Dr. Amon's clinic in Atlanta. They imaged my brain, and that kind of started my journey.

And then I looked into precision genetics. That's what changed my life. I found out what I need and what don't need. So that's part of my story. When you talk about infertility, and miscarriages, you'll hear everyone say MTHFR. It's Methylene Tetrahydrofolate Reductase Deficiency. Well, there's a whole pathway, and it has impact on that, but you've got to look at all these other areas, too. Yes. And we have an episode coming up that is literally just going to be about breaking down Mthfr, so please stay posted.

Dr. Ku2019s personal health journey 18:58

A part of your story, Dr. K, that I first want to thank you for being so incredibly vulnerable, because it was. It was a time that you were ignored and gaslit. And I just feel like every time we mention that, there's just somebody and the audience are listening that just goes, That's exactly what's happening to me, is that they feel so lost and so alone in all of this. I love that you are a provider who doesn't only want to support them and help them but knows and listens and hears because you don't ignore symptoms.

If you're experiencing this, we're going to believe that your experiencing it so that we can do something about it. But a part of that journey, and this is something that we get a lot, is we'll have someone call in and say, I want help with hormones. And then they get in their initial appointment and we start discussing a condition called chronic inflammatory response syndrome. We start talking about SERS. Other people call it I think mold illness, biotoxin illness. It goes by many a name. But I know that was also a party of your journey.

And I want to kind of understand maybe from a personal point, moving into a medical point is, why do we go there when someone's saying they're struggling with hormone issues or hormone imbalances? Well, this condition not only affects hormones, but it first affects the immune system and the neurologic system, and it's all intertwined. So all of our hormones affect that. Part of where we look at that is we have a lot of questionnaires and forms that we ask patients to fill out, then when they get into the office, trying to piece together everything that's happening and their body may show up with the hormone problems like autoimmune thyroid disease or hypothyroidism, erectile dysfunction, severe symptoms of menopause, waking up in the middle of the night, sweating, and it may be a man who's waking in them all in a night having night sweats.

Severe depression, panic, anxiety, gut dysfunction, all of those things can be part of this service. So if we fail to widen our scope, there's plenty of paces that will give you your hormones, shoot you full of pellets, but you're still having problems. And you may feel a lot better, but you're not going to cross the finish line and become balanced and regulated in all the areas of your life if you don't uncover all of the potential problems. And SIRS is a big root cause of hormone dysfunction. And if I remember correctly, some if not all of the labs that are taken to get your diagnosis of SIRS comes from their hormone levels, are they not?

Yes, so we check. Well, we look at thyroid, but part of this SERS evaluation is looking at cortisol. A hormone that comes out of the adrenal gland, then out the pituitary adrenocortigotropic hormone, ACTH, antidiuretic hormone and osmolality, which happens to do with how much you pee or you don't pee and if you get shocks when you walk across the room and touch things. And then looking at your androgens, testosterone free in total. DHEA, androstenedione, then female hormones. We look at your estradiol, your estriol.

Estrone, progesterone, sex hormone binding globulin, thyroid stimulating hormone, free T4, T3. Because if you're fatigued or you are having hot and cold and diarrhea and constipation and hair loss and growing a little beard or acne and all those things, they're all related. So you really need the full meal deal.

SIRS, biotoxin illness, and hormone symptoms 23:08

There's also a hormone that comes out of the brain that most people have never heard of called MSH or melanocytes stimulating hormone. And if it's low, where it's released from the anterior pituitary, your luteinizing hormone, you're follicle stimulating hormone your oxytocin, thyroid stimulating hormones, growth hormone. Those can be abnormal too. It's all of our hormones. So there's a lot more to the puzzle than measuring a few labs and giving yourself pellets. and not getting to the root cause.

So we're taking a wider look and that's what we are pursuing when we partner with people. I really love that because I think sometimes when can have that conversation, those are some of the things that We are even as a practice are doing better too, which is why we have group medical visits are trying to say like, hey, let me help you understand and functional medicine in general, Which I think so many people are going to be really familiar with. We don't deal with things in silos. Your body is interconnected.

You're arm is literally connected to the part of your body. Why wouldn't we look at it all as whole? And so I it's really important that you touched on that doctor case. So thank you for that. You're welcome. Next up, what are some of the common signs and symptoms of hormone imbalance in a woman that may seem, in the grand scheme of things, really small? But what were some those things that we could start to look for before kind of waiting for it to be a catastrophic thing and that were melting down?

I think as women, we kind put ourselves off a lot more than we should. So maybe we can help people go into more of a preventative action. I would say if you're a menstruating woman, if your having a lot of cramps and pain and a lots of personality, a a of cravings, your hair falling out as one of them, dry skin, knee, disrupted sleep, subtle weight gain, you just keep gaining weight or you can't seem to lose any weight. Oh, there's another hormone called leptin. Leptin receptors are destroyed when your cytokines inflammation is so bad in SIRS.

And you can't lose weight regardless of what you do. People are looking for magic shots and magic pills and magical liquids instead of diving deep and finding the root cause. Our society is instant gratification. The other is sweat, we call them summertime moments, flushing, frequent urination is another clue when it's not necessarily associated with a urinary tract infection, decreased sex drive, vaginal dryness. For a woman, those are some of the things that you look for. to just kind of go, something's not quite right.

So one of the things that you said, and we're just going to kind go over a really big thing, which is there are different fruits and vegetables and whole foods. We've talked about flax. Is there any other specific type of food or food group for the lifestyle approach that would like to mention? You know, anyone can look up seed cycling. It's like supporting the follicular phase and the luteal phase. If you've got a lot of deficiencies, that's not really going to help you. Fiber... And when you say deficancies, you mean like nutrient deficiences or what other kind of deficiency?

Hormone deficencies. Like if we measure your progesterone. And here's the other thing too. With women, we like to use topical hormone replacement therapy. And you need to measure two things. You measure salivary hormones and you measure blood hormones. The reason is you want to see where you are age-wise with the salive very hormones, but you also want check the blood concurrently to make sure that you aren't starting at a high point. and then to check. And it's better to apply topically as a woman, whereas men, we tend to track blood and use injections of testosterone, but you can also do little trochies, things that you suck on that will help.

I think it's good to divide things out so that you only have maybe different forms of estrogen in combination with testosterone, but if a woman doesn't need estrogen, then we can do topical testosterone. alone, but we want that balance. You shouldn't be developing acne or any of that and the hair falling out. So a lot of times when women have pellets, even though it's supposed to be time released, you exceed the physiologic levels of testosterone, even though they say it's time released, and many, many people come to us wanting to get off of their pellets because their hair's falling out.

And regardless of what they do, they can't get it regulated. So that means there's something more than just a hormone deficiency. So I really love what you're saying because where we started off with like the food and stuff, like what we also don't want to ignore is a underlying medical condition,

Common signs of hormone imbalance 28:38

right? So what are saying is please eat toxin free. Please go to EWG and look at the Dirty Dozen and the Clean 15 because that is something that you can do right now. You can do it, you can scan your products, so you do all that. For anybody who has researched hormone health, You will get a lot of different coaches, programs, medication suggestions, all of those things that are magically going to fix what you're saying. What I love that you are saying is, yes, there are very good things you CAN do, but when there're deficiencies, hormone deficancies, that is we're partnering with a provider.

And what I personally love about our health coaches get to partner with your provider as well. So I do believe in the power of health coaching a hundred percent, but in conjunction with there are other deficiencies taking place, we're not just saying, like we are not even judging your lifestyle. We don't know your life style, We do not know who you are listening and all the things you're already doing. I really love that you mentioned all of the different ways that they can layer in. and help with those deficiencies.

Can I ask a question though about this kind of thing? Once you get put on hormone, either replacement or creams or anything, is that just going to be something that they would need to do for the rest of their life? What does that look like? No, not necessarily. Progesterone can be given to a woman of, you know, adolescence on up, depending on what's going on in their body. And just a little bit of progesterin, the second half of your cycle can help you conceive, especially for women who've had numerous children, one right after the other.

But no, your not mandated to that, but living in our toxic environment, You may feel much better, have good, robust bone density, but it all depends on your individuality. And that goes back to why we're here. Precision genetics matter. We can tell when we do the wellness blueprint that we offer here, we also have, there's hormones on the Wellness Blueprint, hormone receptors, and then the autophagy, the detox. I would say too, another thing to remember is that for menopause, a huge missing ingredient are certain minerals.

And you can do all the hormones in the world and still have issues and it may be the minerals that you're missing. So sometimes that may require some IV administration of some minerals to kind of build you up and fill your bucket, and then you could maintain that. But to sustain bone density, brain health in our society, I know for me, um, i will probably have a little bit of hormone replacement the rest of my life because part of was that I did have a Roux-en-Y gastric bypass and forever I am unable to absorb appropriate amounts of certain vitamins and minerals.

So that will help me and it makes me a very happy person to the point that, you know, I'm 61 and, it's kind of funny, a few years ago my husband said, have you gone through menopause? And I just laughed and I said, yeah, honey. He goes, do you know, I meet with my friends and their wives are so gripy. I'm like, Yeah, you when you give your body what you need in the right amounts, so you don't have to be a gripey person and be angry and irritable.

Food, hormone replacement, and individualized care 32:18

That's another thing. Irritability and anger, menopause, perimenopausal is a big fat deal. So yeah. Well, and I feel like the beauty of what we're saying is, is that when your body doesn't have what it needs, ultimately your symptoms, your behaviors, even a part of like what I've spoken to several women, it's like they feel they're not like themselves. Like, I just don't feel myself anymore. Yes, when you're body does not have it what needs you aren't. You don' t get to behave like yourself, you don t feel yourself which is ultimately kind of I want to dive into next real quick, which When someone isn't feeling like themselves, I think it can be really easy for people to want to jump to kind of the things that you said, which is the faster approach, whether that be pellets, or whether it be faster looking for the quick fix.

Can you talk about the difference between our approach which may be a slower approach to things, but is it lasting? Because that's kind what we're dealing with right now is asking those questions. That's really a great question because if you just Google and you look on social media and look at podcasts, there's thyroid talks, menopause talks. There's infertility talks all these things. The foundation of what we do here at Hope for Healing is precision genetics because that's your uniqueness, the way your body works.

And that has set you up to have those problems. I had a patient that just told me she consulted with like a very famous menopause doctor and they said you need to be on this, this this and this. And she's like, wait a minute, you want to put me, oh, everybody should be Wait a minute. What about all the other things that are influencing why my hormones are screwed up? So we start with the genetics. We pull in all that lifestyle because you've got to poop, you got a sleep, and the sleep may be impaired by the imbalances of the hormone.

So that's a work in progress. Then looking at your blood labs and potentially your salivary labs, but also looking to see if you have another condition that's driving the endocrine problems. And that is where what you mentioned before, chronic inflammatory response syndrome or biotoxin illness plays a huge key in that. I think it's so amazing that you went into the way that everything is connected because I Nowadays, people have been trying to silo down, like you have a hormone condition, you had a...

I mean, I can't think of any other conditions at the moment because we're talking about hormones. But what I'm saying is they try to put you in this bubble and then treat you as if you were in the bubble. And then if have you a side effect, well, that's just a Well, that's just the side effect of this versus saying, hey, how can we look at you as a complete person? Because we believe that that holistically you need to get better and you can get I think a great example of that is a man who's struggling with depression.

He's going to a psychiatrist and receiving an antidepressant, but no one bothers to measure his testosterone. And to optimize that, and that can change your worldview. I mean, it can give you the motivation to get up in the morning. That's the other thing, just if your hormones have gone to pot, like you wake up, you don't have any motivation, or you know you have to exercise in order to keep your endorphins up so you won't get depressed. So it's so important to think globally instead of silos, as you were saying.

I love that. Okay, so as we wrap up this episode, I think what I'd love to go over are just I Think this topic can feel really hopeless So I know we we're gonna get a lot more into several other topics around this but whether someone doesn't feel like themselves someone is being told that they can't have a child or feels like they're doing everything right and What is some like hope or even actionable steps that we can give when helping women restore balance and energy and overall wellness when this is just, I mean, let's be honest, some of these people have been struggling for this for years and has still yet to find that kind of hope.

I would go back to the basics. We all need air. We need sunshine. And we need people that love us and don't gaslight us. I think having open-ended conversations, asking questions. If you're stuck going to an allopathic physician, kindly ask those open ended questions if you've done your own research.

Why a slower, root-cause approach works 37:18

But cleaning up your food plan, cleaning what you do control, what do you bring into your home, how you eat and prepare your foods and swallow. Those are things that you have in your control. And then finding a functional medicine provider in you area that can partner with you that is literate in SERS or biotoxin illness, and hormones are all a big part of that. That's paramount. You have to correct those. So starting from the inside out, what you put in, helps influence the hormones that you do make.

So I would say hang in there, start small, and find people that are in your corner and that aren't going to hurt you. And sometimes it's not family. It's better to love them, but if you need to do it from a distance because we want to maintain the relationship. But sometimes our family members are the ones that are most difficult to partner with or for them to understand you. They just don't get it. And we let our hair down with our families, whatever hair you may have. So that can be really hard to hear.

No. One of the things that, just because you touched on not all of us falling into like a cookie cutter approach to this hormone health, and then there are things we can know genetically, if someone was wanting to maybe dive into a little bit more of like maybe the thing they were born with, because that's what we're looking, when we are looking at genetics, at least for us, we were looking in a step, so we kind of looking what were we born Because you talked a lot about the importance of really diving into this personal approach, and one of the things you discussed was genetics.

What would be their kind of starting ground for genetics to be able to get more information about maybe autophagy or any of those things? Where would you tell them to start? Well, the panel that if we were starting at ground zero, I would say the immune, autoimmune, and inflammatory panel. And that deals with the inflammation, And then the autophagy piece. That's a very good starting place. And that's excellent. I think that that is extremely helpful. We love to help people with that. Just when you put the fire out, then a lot of times you can start absorbing things.

and knowing what you need and what don't need, because you can get on the internet, take the turmeric for this, this is the type of CBD you'll need. Try this. It's so confusing and so overwhelming. I heard a lot of good things about this. Do you really want to take one more pill that you're guessing about? Why not? No, for sure. So that, you don't waste your time, and you can do targeted help to help restore some balance and function. Well, since you mentioned all that, how does personalized genetics even fix that?

Like how would that even help make sure that we're targeting the right things and making sure we are not just taking another supplement that this influencer said? So how do genetics actually help tailor some of that stuff? What would the results look like or suggestions, maybe just examples of Yeah, that's a really great question because it's not as simple as just inflammation alone. There's multiple systems in our body. there's something called the endocannabinoid system, the toll-like receptor system the JAKSTAT system and there are things that modulate immunity.

Hope, practical steps, and genetics starting points 41:18

And you use different things to target those. So for example, bioidentical hormones target a certain area. Vitamin D lowers inflammation. And there's a substance called palmitoyl ethanolamide that targets the endocannabinoid system. But if you don't have those markers, don' use it. There's also pure cannabidiols that target CB2 receptors, which, you know, lean into inflammation. And then for this toll-like receptors there's, those are all over the body. And we use low dose prescription naltrexone for that.

You can also use curcuminoids. you can use berberine. It depends what your genetics show. And it's targeted. So if your child is autistic, we're going to use what's on their panel. We're not going use something that's not on there panel, why waste your money and your time. No, I really love that. I love because when you specifically mentioned it, which is why I was asking, oh, are you going to take turmeric or not? Well, it could work for you, but do you want to that guess? And that really is your choice, whether people want too.

OK, heard it. It may work from someone. But it also, as in talk with Catherine, she, one of our genetic providers, will be like, Lauren that isn't great for you like that Isn't what you and so I learned that if I would have gotten on the bandwagon where everybody was talking about it She was like it actually could cause some issues. And so i'd really like you to be careful So it's not that we don't sometimes as a provider won't say hey for a short period of time Can you take blink or do whatever but it?

Because of our precision genetics that were able to make those wise decisions And honestly what i've loved is not waste our people's money when they don't need a product that won't actually move the needle. But thank you for kind of breaking that down. I think it's kind important for people to understand, yes, you get this information, but how does that information get applied? And so I really appreciate your time. Specifically, with this whole curcumin thing, if you have a genetic marker in the MAO family, then you can become hypertensive.

And some people will buy bottles of this stuff and be popping the curcumin and thinking, oh, it's good for everybody. Well, then their blood pressure's up and we don't want to cause that problem. So you want be targeted. Thank you for unpacking that a little bit. I love that. Well, thank you all so much for listening and we look forward to you joining us on the next episode. Thanks for joining for today's episode on women's hormones. We hope this conversation gave you practical insight into how functional medicine can bring balance at every stage of life.

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