Ok, men: you should have by now a pretty good idea that a lot of your health depends on having healthy levels of Testosterone. And yet, it typically goes down every year while you age! We now know that if your gut bacteria are imbalanced, that imbalanced microbiome will cause leaky gut and will cause reduced production of testosterone.
Women, your gut microbiome heavily influences your hormone balance as well. Too high a level of Estrogen can cause many problems, (even increasing cancer risk) and the metabolism of estrogen is affected by gut bacteria.
The connections between gut bacteria and hormone levels work both ways also. This means that if you’ve been struggling to improve your gut bacteria or gut function, fighting with IBS unsuccessfully, etc: an undiscovered answer might be working to balance your hormones!
When we look at the hormone and gut bacteria equation, there are a couple of directions to go. The functional medicine direction is to evaluate both the gut bacteria and the hormone levels, and do what is possible to improve either. Hormone levels can be changed by using diet and herbal supplements, but they can also be changed via bio-identical hormone application when the hormone levels are very low. Either can be a viable strategy, though if a hormone level is elevated, the functional approach may be required. If you have a bit of both issues, you might need both approaches to address the two sides of the issue!
It’s important to realize that there is an element of “mutual causality”, which means that an imbalance in gut bacteria will cause imbalanced hormones, but imbalanced hormones will cause leaky gut and imbalanced gut bacteria as well! It’s probably that one went bad first, but after they’re both imbalanced, they both need help getting back on track.
We have gut bacteria and hormone testing available in our WellProz shop, and online consultations are available to discuss, plan, sort out a way to move forward and improve! Often this involves a planning session/evaluation first, and then a labwork results review/action planning after labwork is completed and results are available. If gut healing is one of the needed goals to restore balance, a modified diet combined with pre and probiotics, as well as products to kill off unwanted overgrowths or pathogens, are all part of working plans that are easy to implement.
If you’d like to know more, here are some resources:
Fall 2022 special: free first visit to discuss testing options, or what care would look like. https://neurodoc4u.com/schedule/ola/services/free-first-visit-evaluation
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The Symbiont Factor Blog 