How To Optimize Hormone Health For Longevity | Dr. Mark Hyman

you will find your health diminished you'll have low energy low motivation low concentration low cognitive function low libido low sexual function and erectile dysfunction not so great hormones are things that are often overlooked they're misunderstood uh and often cause so much stress for people because they're not optimized whether it's your sex hormones whether it's thyroid hormones whether it's growth hormones we're going to talk about all of it today we're going to focus on sex hormones particularly and things that relate to sex hormones and a little bit about adrenal hormones but they're kind of connected because everything is connected when it comes to the body particularly around hormones so what should you know if you're a guy I'm GNA go uh through men and I'm gonna go through women I'm gonna start with the guys first because they're a bit straight more straightforward the first thing should know is your testosterone and and your testosterone is something that's not just good to look at if you're 90 years old and you know are having trouble or if you're 70 or 60 these are hormones that are are things that you should know about your health all through your life Spectrum you know I've seen 30y olds with the hormone levels of a 90y old they go well you know and what by the way what's normal right if you look at a normal range of hormones depending on which lab you look at the reference range is like 200 to a thousand show is having a level of 250 the same as having a level of 950 obviously not and and how do they come to those ranges well they come to those ranges by looking at the average in a population uh which is if you have an unhealthy population the average is bad right so you want to be optimal now we typically say for a male you should have a testosterone level over 500 but probably it should be more like six seven eight even 900 and and hormone levels are really important because they determine so much about your health hormones particularly testosterone is important for building muscle for motivation for cognitive function for energy for Focus uh and if you're don't have adequate levels of testosterone by the way also for sexual function for libido for erections for all things that are important in life and if you don't have adequate levels of testosterone you will find your health diminished you'll have low energy low motivation low concentration low cognitive function low liido low sexual function and erectile dysfunction not so great so uh how do you measure hormones we look at both the total testosterone and also the free testosterone and we also look at estrogen levels and we look at also brain hormone levels like FSH and LH and we look at something called sex hormone binding globulin so we don't just look at one thing we look at the whole pattern of what's going on with your hormonal health and we can tell a lot for example some guys you know this is really common in America where you see guys with big bellies right pretty much the norm if you have a big belly what's going on there you have visceral fat or visceral adapost tissue or vat or belly fat right and and it's not like normal fat it's actually producing all sorts of bad things including inflammation including uh you know oxidative stress it screws up your your brain chemistry it makes youung hungry it it it prevents you from burning fat it it makes you gain more weight it makes you more insulin resistant it creates a vicious cycle but one of the things that happens is you actually tend to shift your hormone production to more estrogen so when you see men for example who have big bellies they often have loss of hair on their body or they have you know you know soft more soft skin right so what's going on there well they're having high estrogen and low testosterone and and so basically the bigger your belly the lower your testosterone it's easy test you just look at the mirror but it's better to know your numbers and check your blood now when you have low testosterone what can you do about it if you're you have low total low free testosterone if you have high estrogen levels What can you do well it's important to understand that these things can be managed through lifestyle right cutting out the sugar and starch increasing fat where does cholesterol I mean where did your testosterone come from it comes from fat cholesterol is the building block of all your steroid hormones steroid hormon hor not just you know obviously um cortisone or or or anabolic hormones but they're but all your sex hormones are made from cholesterol so if you have low fat in your diet and low saturated fat you actually tend to have lower sex hormones and so you can boost the quality of fat in your diet you can cut out the starch and sugar and and other things can also help alcohol is not good so alcohol also increases estrogen levels it poisons your liver so you can't metabolize it and by the way yes men have estrogen they just have lower levels than women and yes women have testosterone just lower levels than men so the testosterone levels go down estrogen levels go up with alcohol and uh and so there's a lot of things you can do like changing your diet and and stopping drinking or reducing drinking but you also can exercise large muscle groups like the large muscles like your glute muscles your hamstrings your your quads heavy uh uh weight lifting with lower body uh muscles is a great way to boost your testosterone and also your growth hormone we'll talk about that in a minute so having a a proper exercise routine is really important also environmental chemicals can affect your hormones so reducing your exposure to environmental chemicals really important it's important to understand you know again looking at the numbers you've got to understand not what's the normal level but what is the optimal level for where you are like I you know I am 63 years old but I don't want the hormone levels of a 95-year-old who's unhealthy I want the hormone levels of young 40 or 50 or even 30y old so I want my hormones around 800 700 and that's where I get them by by using a comprehensive approach you just have to know what to do because everything we do influences our hormones um so getting getting your testosterone straight is really important for men for for all the reasons I just mentioned we also look at other hormones including uh DHEA sulfate this is a hormone that looks at your adrenal function adrenal function is connected to your sex hormones but often as we're under stress as we age our DHA levels go down and we tend to age faster we tend to have more fatigue we tend to have less libido we tend to have other issues so checking your your dhaa level is really important because that tells you where you are in the stress response and also what you can do about it now you can boost your DHA by lifestyle factors we talked about you can actually take dhaa it's a supplement Al it's a hormone it s as a supplement um and we also we also look at uh in addition to that we look at igf1 which is an add-on test of function Health panel F1 measures uh your basic level of something called insulin like growth factor one and that is important because it's an indirect reflection of your growth hormone as we age our growth hormone goes down we tend to repair things less well we tend to rebuild tissues less well so you want to have make sure we have adequate growth hormone now you don't want it too high because too high can mean insulin resistance it can mean more inflammation it can be a sign of you know um more issues you know potentially that cause cancer so we want to keep our growth hormone levels in a good level not too high not too low so but but again things like strength training and exercise and certain supplements like Arginine can actually help naturally build growth hormone there's peptides we can use there's all sorts of things that can be used to optimize your hormone levels and your growth hormone levels to fix your adrenals and if you're adrenals are shot like with a DH low there's lots of things you can do we've talked about a lot in the podcast but you know all sorts of ways to regulate your stress response for meditation to yoga to breath work to you know hanging out with friends to being in nature the list goes on but it's important to understand that you have power over these numbers they're not just you're not just a passive recipient of whatever numbers you got they're highly modifiable because your entire biology is the result we call your phenotype is the result of your lifestyle washing over every cell in your body every minute so every thought you have every bite of food you take every exercise you do or don't do how much sleep you get and all influences everything all the time so uh we have tremendous power at any moment um what else should we be paying attention to uh as a men well PSA tests are important and they're not perfect but it can be elevated if you have an large prostate but it can also be a sign of Cancer so it's important to see what's going on with your PSA and it's something we screen as part of the uh panel and we also look at not just the total PSA but the free PSA which gives us a better indicator of whether or not you are having a higher likelihood of of having early prostate cancer and it's something you can track over time and often with PSA people can have normal PSA and still have prostate cancer but what we see often is a a change in the number over time so it's the rate of of increase so let's say your number is one but it goes to let's say four is considered abnormal let's say it goes to two well one to two is a big jump right that means something may be going on or if it goes two to four so it doesn't have to be abnormal but it can still be an indicator over time of how to pick up early signs of prostate cancer and it's it's one of the major cancers in man that kills so many people so I think that's that's important to know so so you get a big comprehensive view of what's going with your hormones and then you can intervene with various lifestyle factors and you can actually see changes over time and then we can recheck and see how you're doing so that's the guys what about for women what about hormones for women well I think it's it's unfortunate but women have to suffer a lot more hormonal chaos than men for a lot of reasons their hormones are changing all the time with menstrual cycles with menopause with puberty they're much more sensitive to environmental toxins um and how those impact hormonal function they're much more affected by stress they're much more affected by alcohol by dietary changes by lack of exercise by smoking all these things mess up hormones so it's important for me to understand what their hormones are doing how they're affecting them why they feel what they feel and we see you know incredible array of hormonal disorders in women that cause so much suffering it really isn't necessary it's you know women should not have screwed up hormones that cause all sorts of symptoms like PMS or fibroids or PCOS which is polycystic ovarian syndrome or infertility or menopausal symptoms or menstrual cramps I mean these are these are things that that are not a design flaw in humans it's because of how we're living and what we're doing and that we have agency over so you know I've written a lot about this I used to be a Dr Kenya Ranch and I basically that was my whole population was women between like 30 and 60 so I got a really good sense of what's going on and was measuring a lot of hormonal tests and could see changes over time you know think about it 75% of women have some PMS symp symptoms which is nuts why why is that an something women have to suffer from it's not you know I had a a patient recently who had severe menstral cramps and things were really out of balance for her and and she didn't really realize what was going on and and there's ways to fix that so we were able to fix it for her change your diet adjust a few things and she has no more menstrual cramps so the body has an incredible capacity to repair and heal we just have to know how to activate it so what are the tests we look at for women a few of the same ones but also different ones we look at estrogen we look look at progesterone we look at also testosterone we look at DHA sulfate we also look at pituitary hormones like FSH LH sex hormon binding globulin and a few others I'll talk about a minute so that gives us a really complete picture know what's going on so we can tell for example if women are having something called estrogen dominance this is a really common condition in the world because a lot of things we do cause us to produce too much estrogen in relation to our progesterone particularly in in in menstruating women and even postmenopausal by the way postmenopausal women can have high estrogen levels and what causes high estrogen levels well sugar and starch okay there the problem we know that if you listen to me you know that's kind of basically the problem for everything so too much sugar and starch raise um insulin which causes more fat deposition more fat leads to more estrogen production because you're there's something in your fat cells cause called aromatase which actually uh causes your sex hormones to turn into estrogen that's what happens to men to their estrogen gets converted I mean their testosterone gets converted to estrogen so when you have too much fat tissue particularly belly fat you get higher levels of estrogen if you drink alcohol it it poisons your liver and you get higher levels of estrogen if you don't exercise uh you may have higher levels if your gut is not healthy and you don't have enough have the healthy bacteria in your gut and fiber you might increase your estrogen Levels by by re recirculating estrogen that you excrete from your your liver into your body and raising your estrogen levels it can be because of stress cortisol will increase estrogen levels certain uh environmental toxins will do that as well there's a lot of things called xenoestrogens which are environmental toxins like all the Plastics and pesticides and Pedro chemical toxins all all can screw up your estrogen levels so we have we we really need to understand that our our hormones as women I'm not a woman obviously women's hormones are highly variable change over their life cycle and highly influenced by our lifestyle and what we do so we have tremendous agency over changing those things and figuring out what to do about them so knowing your numbers is really important when it comes to this and we see for example if I want to know if a woman is having like estrogen imbalance and they may be having heavy bleeding they may be having clots they may be having uh menstrual cramps they might be having fibroids or maybe all these issues and I know that might be high estrogen so I want to check there estrogen and progesterone ratio if they have high estrogen and and low progesterone relatively that's a problem I also can look at the other numbers like LH and FSH this is common if you have a woman with PCOS which is really common it's a cause of infertility but we'll see with those women a high level of LH and FSH being low so the ratio of f LH to FSH goes up and that's a clue that there's this problem of PCOS so we can tell a lot from these numbers from the patterns of the numbers we also look at something called prolactin both in men and women and this is a pituitary tumor that has broad impact on our health and and is influenced by many factors and we've actually found people with tumors in their pituitary that are benign tumors but they actually produce prolactin and that can cause all sorts of health and metabolic effects so it's important to kind of get a picture of these numbers we also look for women also at the igf one for the same reasons and we also look at another test that's unique to women um called antim malarian hormone antim malarian hormone is a great indicator of your fertility the higher the number the more fertile you are the lower the number the less fertile you are so a lot of women wanting to know whe their ility status can actually get this test also we also check testosterone because just as we check estrogen in men we also check testosterone women and a lot of women tend to have uh low liido or low sexual function or decreased arousal or lower lower orgasms and and that all can be because of hormonal effects and I often treat people directly with hormonal therapy with this or with other things that boost testosterone but it's fixable and and sometimes you know lifestyle can be very effective as we mentioned and sometimes you need bioidentical hormones both for men and women so I will prescribe hormones for men testosterone I will prescribe um combination hormones for women estrogen press progesterone testosterone depending on what they need but it's very personalized and it's very individualized so uh in the guide uh that you get with your function report you actually get to know you know what are the things you can do about these numbers but it's really about finding the nuances and then there's a lot of supplements that can help both with men and women men can there's a lot of great supplements that help with libido and sexual function also for women same thing a lot of women women can take herbs to help with regulating estrogen progesterone imbalances with uh various kinds of hormonal disorders for example Chase ber is great for PMS and there's other other therapies we use but it's a combination of things in a perfect world look I'd be seeing millions of patients billions of patients ideally I've had so much experience but the truth is I'm just one doctor and and the conventional healthc care system is already buckling under the weight of so many sick people who aren't able to access good access to Healthcare in fact you know there's I think over 100,000 Physicians shortage nursing shortages and we have so many sick people in America Six out of 10 of chronic illness 93% are metabolic and healthy 75% overweight one to have diabetes I know it's depressing right but but here's the deal most of those things are entirely preventable or even reversible using a comprehensive approach that deals with the root causes addresses the lifestyle factors and are things that you can do on your own and don't need it doctor now based on this thinking uh around knowing your numbers and why I believe it's so important to democratize healthcare I helped co-found a company called function Health which is a revolutionary way to understand and manage your own health that starts with a comprehensive set of over 100 lab tests they're delivered to you in an easy to understand dashboard that tracks your numbers over time and gives you clear insights actionable insights about every biomarker tested what it means what the reference ranges are convention what the optimal reference ranges are how to actually use the things that are at your disposal lifestyle supplements things that you can access yourself that actually don't require a doctor that Health happens not in the doctor's office it happens where we leave live eat work play and pray I always say I can't cure diabetes in my office it's cured in the kitchen in the grocery store on the farm in the restaurants right so all these are are important insights that you should have about your body so we're building function to democratize much of what I do and give you the keys to your own health and put control back in your hands it's the most powerful approach to health I've seen in my career as a doctor and it's I think the most crucial step you can take for your health and and to own your health and to become the SE of your own health now the weight list for function is open uh we have over 11,000 people that have already gone through uh it's live across the United States we're inviting new members to join a waight list every day and if you're interested in taking control of your health get your spot on the weight list right now go to function health Doc it's really Empower empowering to know what's going on and often people just don't feel right or they have this or that symptom and they don't really know what's going on and and the doctor doesn't quite know how to deal with it and that's really the purpose of function is to let you know what's going on under the hood to give you the tools and the knowledge you need to be able to fix it so it's really a very comprehensive approach that will leave you feeling empowered and understanding what to do to help yourself live a a long healthy life uh you know I think one of my missions in life is to end needless suffering for millions of people there's certain things you can't fix right there's a natural disaster a war you know house falls on you or something uh like the wicked which of the West what can you do but but most of the things people suffer from are optional it's needless suffering and it has to do with not having the right information uh about what's going on in your body and not knowing what to do about it and that's really the purpose of function and function off is to give you the knowledge and the road map so I'm super excited about it like I said I I can see millions of patients if I had a perfect life but uh that's not how the world works I can't do that with function health I feel like we're trying to democratize much of what I do uh offering you the keys to your own health uh and as a doctor you know this is the most powerful approach I've seen uh that's come around yet to help people Empower be empowered with their own health data which I think is their right I I believe in everybody has the right to health sovereignty to be the SE of their own health and to understand how to be empowered with the right information and not have to go through the healthcare system to do that um function fills that Gap right our Healthcare System is strained you know and and we just can't keep up with all the sick people and and a lot of the stuff that actually is going to make you better is not going to happen in your doctor's office anyway which is your lifestyle so what can you do well you can get function Health you can join as a member and get over a 100 lab tests to cover everything from Full hormone testing to all heart health testing to thyroids nutrient status toxins and lots more and and doctors often don't test these things they just uh either don't know about them they don't have the time they don't know how to interpret them they think it's unnecessary uh they haven't been trained in it it's not their fault but but you don't have to deal with all that anymore you can go right to your own body and figure out what's going on no more dealing with in burdensome insurance no more getting lost with complicated medical records no more Googling your results and figure out what doct Google has to say which is usually not accurate uh function offers a clear set of understandable results that are tracked over time and and uh allow your you to see what's going on in your body and make informed decisions that will transform your health over time and you can get all this for $4.99 a year if you love that last video you're going to love the next one check it out here

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 16,039

Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation

Id: AadRflBO0MM

Length: 20min 59sec (1259 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 10 2023