Mastering Hormonal Harmony With Maca

Introduction to Maca and the Summit 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Summit. I am your co-host, Dr. Carrie Jones, and I am very, very, very excited to talk to you today with my friend Dr. Deanna Minich from Symphony Natural Health. All about my favorite root Maca. Yes, many of you may think Maca is an herb or a plant, but the part that we use is the root and as I said, it is one of my absolute favorites. It has a lot of misinformation out there, a lot of interesting information out there. And we are going to bust Summits with Dr. Minich.

So, Deanna, welcome to the Summit. I'm so excited to have you here. Hi, Carrie. I'm so excited for this conversation because there are so many myths about Maca. That is the truth. Let's let's start with that. Let's start with what is Maca and what isn't Maca in relation to women who are trying to become pregnant? Yes. Well, first and foremost, I just want to mention to everybody that we just published a 46 page paper and it was titled Not All Maca Is Created Equal. So for many people, they just think Maca is Maca is Maca.

But there are actually 17 different phenotypes of Maca and they all have different functions. So not all Maca is the same. And in fact our research on specific Maca phenotypes has shown that there are different phenotypes which have different DNA, different analytical profiles and different physiological effects. So, Carrie, here here's the takeaway for people, because most people think it's just one plant, but because there are so many different varieties and phenotypes, if there are different types.

So one phenotype can affect fertility in men, another can support fertility in women, and one phenotype can support prostate health.

Why Not All Maca Is the Same 1:51

Two of them can support bone health. Then there are specific ones for menstrual health and then some for menopausal symptoms. So here's the thing. If if women are taking Maca just from the grocery store, they may actually have an undesired effect. They might get acne, they might get hair loss. So for women with PCOS, estrogen dominance, thyroid issues, the wrong type can actually make those conditions worse. So it makes sense to use a type of Maca that has and clinically tested and that you actually know what you're getting.

Yeah, because otherwise it's a plant. Plants have lots of different phenotypes, different phytochemicals. So Femmenessence is an actual clinical tested blend of phenotypes. Ideal for women's health. Which is so helpful because I have heard women I've gotten feedback from women in this Summit who say, oh, I just walk to the store. I bought Maca. I heard it's good for whatever adrenals or my hormones or stress and exactly that I broke out or I don't feel like it worked. I took it for a month and nothing happened.

And I thought, you know, I bet what they did is they just bought a conglomeration of a blob of different Maca, didn't know it, and they are possibly competing with each other, knocking each other out, or it's geared towards one phenotype that isn't actually helping women's health. Bingo. I think you got it right there where you said it's just one phenotype that isn't helping women's health, the type that you might get in the grocery store. And you know, Carrie, one of the things that we found from doing this paper is that most Maca products don't define what they are on the label, so you. Don't actually know what you're. Taking.

So with with the type of Maca that is known to be adaptogenic. So I'm sure that most people listening know it in Adaptogen says it's a plant compound that can help to adapt the body's response to stress. Well, certain types of Maca do just that. They support the adrenals, but then there are other types of Maca that actually help to nourish the hypothalamus, the pituitary, the thyroid, the adrenal and the ovary and access so that it does a bit more if you're only stimulating or modulating the adrenals, you might actually change other systems.

And you know, it may not be ideal. What you want to do is balance the endogenous production of hormones within, and that's what Femmenessence does. Again, this is Femmenessence there's actually three separate products and there's one that's designed for premenstrual health and it's based on two preclinical clinical trials for published clinical trials. And most recently, we just published four case

Femmenessence for Hormone Recalibration 4:39

reports on the main active in Femmenessence. And so what we know about the one for premenstrual health, which is called Femmenessence Maca harmony is that it helps to balance. So for a woman with estrogen dominance who can't get pregnant, she can safely take Femmenessence because what it will do is it will recalibrate the different hormones in her body to optimize her hormones for her. So it's not going to make things worse. It'll actually recalibrate. And so, you know, oftentimes it'll take like 2 to 4 cycles for women to reestablish their periods to and, you know, initially we've had people that will that have written into our medical team.

One woman in particular, I can think of where she was trying to get pregnant. So she started to take Femmenessence and she wrote in to the medical team. After two months of taking Femmenessence and said, You know what? This product actually made my period worse. It shortened my cycle, it made me bleed heavier. I want my money back. I don't think this product is working well. Our medical team walked her through this a little bit more because as we know, as the body, especially hormones, start to recalibrate, there can be all kinds of changes.

There could be shedding, there can be changes in the different ratios of hormones. And so there can be this shift that requires a little bit of time. So our medical team worked with her a bit and said, you know, just hang in there just to have a little bit of patience, continue to take the product. Well, within three months time we got an email from her saying that she hadn't told anybody yet, but she was pregnant. Oh, had been, yes. So we actually followed that case on through. And she did have a healthy baby.

And we have this term Femmenessence baby. You know, for a woman who has been trying to get pregnant for about 12 months and essentially, you know, she starts taking Femmenessence. And within 4 to 6 months, she gets pregnant. You know, I was just talking to one of my colleagues, Dr. Kim Ross, about this. And, you know, she was at a booth, her symphony, and she had at the show a woman come up to her and had the baby with her. So, you know, it's possible once we start to balance our cycles with known Maca phenotype such as the ones in Femmenessence, you know, we recalibrate.

It's like we get in there and we tune the hypothalamus to signal things better. I love that. Which was actually my next question, because I know women are thinking, well, what if what if I have low progesterone? What if I don't ovulate? What if I struggle with egg quality? What if I'm struggling? Right. So there's a lot of you know, maybe somebody was thinking, well, I don't think estrogens might issue, but I think it's these other things. Could Femmenessence work for me as well? Well, first and foremost, I want to say that everything that everybody has been listening to in this Summit, so when we talk about nutrition and sleep and relaxation and goodness, stress is so important for women trying to get pregnant.

I was just talking with Dr. Marc Sklar, who's on our medical team yesterday, talking about the role of stress. And, you know, we can create over exercising. We're just too much stress. So all of these things are important that everybody's been listening to. But what makes Femmenessence different from all of this and why a woman with high estrogen or low progesterone or all these many imbalances doesn't we don't need to be concerned about what it is, because the the Femmenessence actually has the intelligence from the plant to go in and essentially rework, recalibrate and get things in alignment.

So if high estrogen is the the issue, then bringing that estrogen down to a healthy level. You know, we just had a published case on PCOS. And when I think of PCOS, I think of high cortisol. High insulin, high testosterone. And even seeing that Femmenessence can help in the case of PCOS. And a lot of women get nervous, especially if they have PCOS to try something like Maca because it's backfired before. And so maybe they went to the store. We even had somebody from Whole Foods who was working in the the natural products section of Whole Foods, and she had PCOS and she was very reluctant to try Femmenessence.

So she talked with our medical team. They said, don't worry, you know, this is about recalibration. It's not about inflating your hormone levels. It's like a thermostat in a house. You know how you're in a room and you set it to 70 degrees and then the house furnace or air conditioning unit does what it needs to do to keep it at 70. That's essentially what Femmenessence is doing. So this woman at Whole Foods who was using it for PCOS,

PCOS, Cycle Support, and Brain-Hormone Communication 9:35

she essentially it was great because like when you well when the team talked with her when you read through her testimonial, you know, for years and years she was just off in her cycle. And she said within four weeks, just within that one month timeframe, she started cycling again and she started to reduce a lot of her symptoms. And that's typically what we see. So for women with mood issues around their period, we tend to see about a three week turnaround time after starting Femmenessence. And then and for women that have issues with their cycle, whether or maybe they're they're not cycling, they have heavy bleeding, all kinds of issues.

You know, it depends on the woman and what has been going on for her and what the actual root causes would be, how long she's had those issues. But that can be between one and four months. And the idea is not to be unfeminine since forever. You know, what we want to do is get in like that thermostat, change the recalibration of the hypothalamus. And then once she has been having some regular cycles for like 3 to 4 months, she starts to transition on off and then she goes on perhaps a maintenance dose or just goes off of it entirely.

I love that you use the word collaboration because in a lot of this summit we've been talking about brain health. We talk about the this the input into the brain, even with you and Marc Sklar talking about with stress, all of that comes into the hypothalamus and then the hypothalamus acts as that leader board again, that like master thermostat and decide what are we doing with our hormones today? And I don't think people fully realize that when hormones get communicated, it's a pulse. It's like Morse code as opposed to a hose.

It's not like you turn on a garden hose and out comes all this hormone, like all this estrogen or all this progesterone doesn't pour out. But if you get the Morse code wrong, if you send that text message wrong, we know, obviously the body will completely misinterpret it. And now perhaps it's PCOS or perhaps it is lack of ovulation or perhaps it's too much estrogen. So I really appreciate it. Always have, since I learned about feminine essence years ago. The recalibration point. Because sometimes there's a lot that happens in the brain we just don't know.

We just don't know what signals are coming up there or the brain is reading and scanning and then sending out incorrect Morse code or reactive morse code may be a better word. So I love that femme in essence is intelligent. The intelligence of the plant, the root to say, okay, let's straighten this out, let's take some time, you know, let's file correctly, let's clean up these desks, let's get rid of the trash. Let's do all the things we need to do and recalibrate for the hormones. Yeah, I really like that.

You know, starting with the hypothalamus, because the hypothalamus pituitary junction is like that master gland next says that informs the rest. So that's really important. And what has happened, I think for most women where they're experiencing infertility is that they have a break in the feedback loop. So the hypothalamus might be working just fine, but then the ovaries communicating back up to the hypothalamus pituitary is not working so well. So there's a break in communication. You know, in functional medicine we talk about hormones as communicators.

So where is the communication? Off in the body. And again, what I love about the name of our company, Symphony Natural Health, is that we reestablish that symphonic messaging, right, that communication, the music inside the body. And it's almost like your endocrine system is an orchestra. You've got the violinist, you've got the pianist, you've got, you know, and if there's one access, whether it's the ovaries or it's the adrenals or it's the thyroid that's out of alignment, out of tune, it's like you hear it through the whole orchestra, right?

So it's like they're all very interconnected. So feminine sense to me is like the overall, the, the, the composer and helps to align that orchestra. It's the conductor of getting all of that that symphony going in. The other thing, you know, Kyra, I'm glad that you bring up the brain aspects, because I think that that's a very important point to reestablish that. And we also know that because it's helping to tweak hormones, it could actually change some of the brain cognitive mood aspects of the menstrual cycle.

The other point that I think you like a lot and I like a lot is detoxification. The other thing that MOCA is known for is its phytochemicals. So one of the classes of phytochemicals within MACA is Glucosinolates. Now Glucosinolates. In my maca, most people don't know this, but Marcas actually a cousin to broccoli and cauliflower and kale. They're all within the same family, the Brassica.

Dosage, Timing, and Medication Considerations 14:27

And so it's just that they're not interchangeable. It's not like if you have maca that you can now stop eating your broccoli. They have different glucosinolates have different phytochemicals. So in feminist sense, the beauty of feminists and this is what you won't find in just your standard maca powder at the store, is that the glucosinolates have been concentrated, so there are up to ten times greater in concentration and we know that part of the dysregulation in that can happen with whether it dysmenorrhea amenorrhea.

Infertility can also be how we metabolize hormones. It's not always just the balancing act. Sometimes it's the detoxification process. So it's almost like what Fem in essence is doing is it's giving a two pronged approach. The first prong is, yes, it's have being the conductor and getting that orchestra going of that inner endocrine symphony. So that's good because that's balancing hormones no matter where we are at its meeting us where we're at. And then secondly, at the point of the liver, the liver is responsible for that phase one.

Phase two, detoxification of hormones and MOCA happens to be at least feminist sense we know is highly concentrated in Glucosinolates and it is even standardized to glucosinolates. So the amount is is guaranteed in FEM in essence. Whereas if you bought maca at the store, you don't actually know what you're getting in your glucosinolates because they're very susceptible to degradation. They can break down very easily. Now how would somebody listening start taking maca? Is there a loading dose? Is there a basic dose?

What's our general recommendation you have for women looking to become pregnant and really get their hormones back in symphony? Yeah, well, it kind of depends on the woman. First and foremost. Let me just mention that people can always contact our medical team at Symphony Natural Health and kind of talk through the nuance of their own case. But in general, one of the feminists since Mocha harmony twice per day is all that is required. So the way that people take it is they take one in the morning upon rising, and they take that about 30 minutes before they have a meal with about 8 to 16 ounces of water.

And then the second dose would come after lunch before that afternoon dip in energy that most people have, or if they don't have an afternoon dip, then by 3 p.m.. So keeping that same pulsatile rhythm that we, we typically see with hormones, right? So now with birth control and you know how the different pills in the packet are primed with different levels of hormones and it's kind of like changing up your your body's, it's giving you the hormones and it's it's kind of moving you along in that cycle.

And, you know, those are obviously hormones whereas fountain in essence is not hormones. So you can take them, in essence, one twice a day throughout the course of the month. So you don't have to change up the cycle depending on the day of your your cycle at all, just one, twice a day. And for some women, you know, some clinicians like to increase that to two twice a day. So in that same rhythm, in the AM and then in the early PM. Okay, so again, kind of like letting the body do its thing within those first couple of months.

And you know, there might be some changes in the cycle, there might be some differences in bleeding. But overall, you know, waiting through that period till about four months, there should be some positive change there. I love that. And I'm going to ask you another question, but I want to also remind women that when you have a what's called a pre annual follicle, which is the one that's waiting, it's like ready to grow up to become the one that oscillates to get from a pre intro follicle to the to the chosen one.

The month of ovulation is about a three month, 90 day cycle. And so anything I suggest in women's health feminism is included, which is why I love talking with Dr. Deanna, because you've got to get at least three months through for that pre central follicle to grow up to be big and strong and healthy enough to then kick out the egg that's going to ovulate. So the same goes for feminize and stick with it for a good 3 to 4 months. Don't judge it to hardly. If stuff happens it just know that you know that your getting to the office is getting shifted, getting cleaned up.

Now can you take some, in essence with other products? For example, you take it in the morning, maybe about 30 minutes before food. What if somebody has to take thyroid medication at that same time? Yeah, there are no contraindications for taking feminizing, so that's a good thing. So it is a supplement. It can be taken with other supplements. It can be taken with other medications. The only thing is that if somebody is taking thyroid medication or other medications, it might be a good idea. What we typically advise is to take them, in essence, one hour away from that medication.

So whenever you would typically take it. Okay. So and to take them in essence, away from food two is how we have tested it in the clinical trials. So that that also seems to to be helpful in taking it with enough water.

Pregnancy, IVF, and Men's Support Products 19:38

You know, those are just some other tips, but yes, taking it about one hour away from other medications. And I also want to mention Keri, that if women are on oral contraceptives, they may actually be able to taper their dose. So as you talk about medications and they may even be able to taper their thyroid hormone. So I would say to be on the lookout because you're changing the overall endocrine access. You might want to be checking in with your clinician about changing up your thyroid hormone if things start to change or if you're on an oral contraceptive of some kind changing that up.

But Femmenessence can be taken concurrent with those medications. Okay. And if somebody finds out or when somebody finds out they're pregnant, do they need to stop Femmenessence or can they take it? Yeah. So bringing down the dose to one just one time a day within that first trimester and then just not taking it after that first trimester. So you just want to slowly wean off it. So if somebody is taking it one twice a day, then they find out that they're pregnant. Now starting to transition to just once in the morning and then within that first trimester, continue with that once in the morning and then stopping thereafter and then not to take Femmenessence, if if pregnant, then thereafter or even if nursing.

But it can be resumed after the pregnancy. Okay. And then last question around pregnancy. What if somebody is going through something like IVF and is struggling? Maybe they've gone through a couple of cycles. It's getting expensive. It hasn't worked out. And they're thinking, you know what, this might be a great opportunity for me to add Femmenessence in with it. What has been your experience with that? Yes, in fact, I can talk firsthand. I was just talking again with Dr. Marc Sklar yesterday, who uses Femmenessence.

And we have a men's product as well called Revolution. And he uses them in order to prepare people for optimizing their IVF outcomes. So indeed, I mean, there can be a whole protocol. What he does is he uses acupuncture, he uses different nutrients, he brings in Femmenessence for women. He brings in Revolution for men. And in fact, the case that he presented in a man yesterday looking at sperm motility, that if looking at the overall number of sperm, it was so fascinating just to see how, again, within that 90 day timeframe, you can start to see substantial changes with these types of protocols.

So yeah, it could definitely be a helpful modality for including to a protocol to help with optimizing the chances for a successful IVF. Oh, I love this and I'm glad you brought up Revolution. Obviously, I know the focus is Femmenessence, but you know those sperm, they're there. One sperm is 50% of this equation. And of course, we want it to be the best, smartest, strongest, healthiest sperm possible. So I love that. So there is a men's product to support them as well. Revolution. Yes. And again, Dr. Marc Sklar has a lot of experience with using both of these products and men and women.

And for the Revolution product, it would help with increasing testosterone. It would help with increasing sperm characteristics. So sperm motility, morphology. So and you know, he also mentioned and we also know this as well at Symphony that for some women who want to increase testosterone, a Revolution has been used. He has used that. But that's not something we we you know, it's not a product that is intended for women. You know, they're very distinct, right. Because, again, if a woman were to take Revolution where she didn't have the indication for taking Revolution, she could have, you know, undesirable effects.

Right. You know, back to the acne, hair loss and kind of the androgenic effects. Yeah. So staying with the particular product and even within Femmenessence, again we have three products and they're all different. So they have the intelligence inside that has been studied, but each one has been tweaked in Maca phenotypes in order to get whether it's the balancing effect or for women going through menopause and post menopause. There are other kinds of phenotypes to include there. So it's really important to be sure that you're on the right product for you to give you the effects that you want.

So when we're talking about fertility, it's Femmenessence Maca Harmony. I love that Femmenessence Maca Harmony. Well, Dr. Deanna Minich, I so appreciate you coming on today. Of course, the next natural question is where can everyone get Femmenessence? Yes. Well, we actually have a Femmenessence website. I would say go to symphonynaturalhealth.com on the Symphony Natural Health website, you're going to see all of the Femmenessence products. You'll also see the Revolution product. And we also have an Herbatonin product, which is a Plant Melatonin.

And some people are also advocating melatonin use for helping with fertility outcomes. So that might also be something to discuss with your clinician. Amazing. Well, again, I thank you so much for coming on this summit today. This has been a wealth of information for everyone listening. I personally have known about and been using Femmenessence and a lot of the Natural Symphony products for years and years. So it was such an honor to talk with you and about a product that I personally know and love.

So thank you again. Thanks for having us. Carrie. Great to be part of the Summit.