Hormone Help

Can we talk about hormones?  Your body has two primary ways of maintaining a state of balance and well-being that is known as homeostasis.  First, your brain communicates with the body electrically through the nervous system to control all the other cells, tissues and organs.  This method has a faster response time, but is generally for short-term regulation.  The second method of communication is the endocrine or hormone system.  Hormones are chemical messengers that are released into the blood to travel to receptor sites on other tissues, glands, or organs.  This method takes a little longer for a response, but the results are intended to last longer as well.  In a sentence, hormones alter our physiology by turning things on and turning things off.  There’s a great deal of attention being paid to hormones lately and I believe it’s justified – all our physiology and our ability to maintain health over disease can be tied to the balance of these tiny chemicals.  With this in mind, I found a couple recent articles that report how we could impact our own hormones.

When you study hormones in physiology class, the first thing you learn is that the interaction of these numerous chemicals is rather complex and that they are all ultimately coordinated by a portion of the brain known as the hypothalamus.  Modern science has proven that the hypothalamus is the part of the brain that responds to our environment to help us adapt to our current needs.  Because of this, the hypothalamus is influenced by our diet through what we eat, drink, and breathe, our level of activity and exercise, our sleep, and possibly most importantly our thoughts and stress level.  Thus, our lifestyle has an enormous effect on how hormones are regulated and how our bodies are performing.  For instance, exercise and movement of our joints and muscles literally shuts off the stress response in the brain and changes our hormones.  Stress reduction techniques such as yoga, meditation, and prayer have shown enormous benefits in reducing the stress hormones as does proper sleep.  I recently found some foods that appear to have a direct effect on our hormones as well.  For instance grains and sugars decrease the levels of seven of our most important hormones!  This is huge!  Likewise, alcohol decreases your HGH (human growth hormone).  Just one drink can reduce HGH by 75%.  This is the stuff that helps build muscle at the expense of fat.  On the flip side, foods and supplements with magnesium will increase HGH and other sex hormones such as testosterone.  Even though they were vilified in the past, healthy proteins such as organic beef, chicken, and fish and even healthy fats such as egg yolks, lard, and butter have been shown to improve progesterone and DHEA.  This last hormone is a steroid produced in your adrenal glands that helps reduce premature aging and mental stress.  The importance of these natural fats and proteins is one of the reasons for the popularity of the Paleo diet.  Remember too that all our fat soluble vitamins, especially vitamins D and A help to regulate hormones as well. 

This should serve as more evidence that we have great influence over our entire physiology through the choices we make.  I cannot emphasize enough the importance of proper exercise, sleep, and thinking as well as becoming more aware of what you put in your body at mealtime and understanding the ramifications of those choices.