I Disagree

by Patrick Flynn

  I’m sure some jaws will drop here, but I wish menopause for my wife. We have our four beautiful babies, and we’ve decided not to have anymore. I wish my wife could just go through menopause so she wouldn’t have to deal with her cycle anymore. Does that sound like something any other man would wish for his wife if menopause is truly a horrible event? It is so much easier to keep a woman’s hormones healthy and normal when she isn’t cycling. A menopausal woman’s hormone cycle isn’t any different than a guy’s really, it’s just a flat line that’s easy to keep right where it should be.

  I had the blessing of helping my mom through this transition. Many people ask me what I did to help her. Well, first they ask me if I like taking care of my mom, especially through menopause. Yes! I want my mom to be healthy. I ran specific tests on her based on what I knew about her. There are multiple test options; blood, saliva, and urine. It depends on the woman and her situation. Each woman is unique and needs to be approached as such, not as a standard procedure. Based on her results there were many options to help her, and I can happily tell you her menopause experience was normal, not common.

  The first step is changing the way you think about menopause and the way you approach your health care.

  The first step is changing the way you think about menopause and the way you approach your health care. If you took one of the test results I ran to a medical doctor, he’d look at the test from the perspective of which medication he is going to put you on. I appreciate that – he’s trying to save you from the discomfort! What different thinking allows you to do, however, is rebuild your house, so you aren’t dependent on a synthetic hormone or worse yet, a psychiatric drug for the rest of your life. You can not only survive menopause but thrive and live a life that is healthy, vital and sexual. Your body was created to go through menopause as a healthy stage of life.

  CHAPTER 13

  Cholesterol is Not a Bad Guy

  “My doctor says my hormones are so low I should be on these synthetic hormones,” a woman tells me after a recent seminar. It’s not the first time. In fact, I hear it often. So, I ask her, “Are you taking a statin or cholesterol altering medication.” She said, “yes.” I’m going to tell you what I told her, the several other women that came up to me that day with the same statement, and what I told the thousands of other women throughout the years: if you are taking a statin drug you can never achieve hormonal balance. Women aren’t the only ones. Men are being told they need to take statins too. This is one of the biggest struggles in medicine, especially as the rate of people on statins is skyrocketing.

  Over 25% of American adults over the age of forty have taken a statin drug in the past thirty days. Will statins lower your cholesterol? Yes. But let’s start this conversation by first understanding cholesterol and how it got the reputation it has.

  Cholesterol got a bad reputation a long time ago because it was assumed it had a role in arterial plaque formation; that idea still continues through traditional medical thinking. Cholesterol was, and still is, found in high numbers at the site of arterial plaquing. Many people thought that because it was there, it was the cause of the plaque formation which would eventually build up and lead to a heart attack. We need to look deeper though, especially with all we are learning in our thinking. It’s easy to blame cholesterol, but remember how the body works and that it doesn’t make mistakes. We need to understand what cholesterol does, and how it works with male hormones and female hormones. This is going to be fun–something I bet you’ve never heard before!

  Every organ needs messages.

  Okay, we have talked about how hormones are messengers. That’s what they do. Steroid hormones are a group of chemical messaging compounds produced by male and female sex organs (gonads), the adrenal glands and the kidneys (mineralocorticoid). It’s your testosterone, your estrogen, your progesterone and other important hormones that keep your body functioning. We got that. Hormones are important and interconnected to your whole body. Hormones involve multiple organs. A lot of steroid hormones are produced in one organ but then go to another and are converted in that organ for function. We will learn a little more about that later in the steroid pathway chart. It will be important to remember that every organ needs messages. There are lots of hormones bringing messages throughout your body helping it function. Steroid hormones impact a lot of your body’s functions like blood pressure, bone density, and your kidneys. It’s not just about male and female cycle differences.

  If the message is messed up there is going to be hormonal imbalances. For example, take a hormone like estradiol. If the message delivered is too high it can develop into cancer, or too low can lead to depression or early menopause. The tissue will listen if it gets the message, but it doesn’t mean it’s the right message for that individual. All of our organs are controlled by messengers and the messengers can affect multiple organs. Medicine in its classification separates everything. We have heart specialists, neurologists, kidney specialists, GI specialists. We need those specialists, but the trouble we run into is they limit their scope to one organ. We need to realize messengers can affect all those organs.

  You can see how important hormones are to the overall balance of the body or homeostasis. Guess where they come from. Are you ready? The building blocks of steroid hormones (and a lot of other important cells) is: cholesterol. Your body needs cholesterol, along with luteinizing hormone, to make steroid hormones. All steroid hormones are derived from cholesterol. Let’s be clear—not all hormones, but all steroid hormones. Which ones are those? Sex hormones, adrenal hormones and kidney hormones. They all need cholesterol.

  As you can see in the chart below, all these hormones start as cholesterol, and then become the hormones needed for a wide variety of functions. Cholesterol is a derivative. It’s not bad for you. It’s a building block for every steroid hormone in the body. You don’t want a goal of no cholesterol. If you do, you will have depleted hormones.

  Why is my cholesterol high? That is the magic question. Your body will make cholesterol when you’re under stress. It actually needs cholesterol to repair itself or when it needs more hormones. If I cut my finger and start bleeding, then my body is going to make more cholesterol to repair the wound.

  Cholesterol isn’t the bad guy here, cholesterol is the police.

  When medical thinking saw the cholesterol there at the site of plaque formation, they incorrectly blamed the cholesterol. Just because the police are at the scene of a crime doesn’t mean they are the ones that caused the crime. Whenever there is damage or inflammation, cholesterol has to go there to protect and heal the area. Cholesterol isn’t the bad guy here, cholesterol is the police. Cholesterol is doing its job to heal and protect. The body is doing its job when it sends the cholesterol there. This misconception leads to the frequent prescription of cholesterol lowering medications. Cholesterol is needed all over and travels via the bloodstream to every single part of the body.

  Let’s put the pieces together. If you are a woman and your adrenals get fatigued because of stress as hormones get low, your cholesterol will go up. It’s your body responding by creating what it needs to heal itself. It’s not because cholesterol is this bad guy that is intruding in your body. It’s not because you are eating too much cholesterol. Trust me, you can’t eat enough cholesterol to make it go dangerously high. One more time—you can’t eat so much cholesterol that it will go up significantly. If your cholesterol goes up, there is a physical reason why. Only 10-20% of the cholesterol in your body is associated to diet and exercise. 80+% is made by the liver. Think about it—the body does not make mistakes. Your liver makes the majority of cholesterol in your body. Do you suppose the liver would actually make something that’s bad for the heart? Knowing what you now know, does that even make sense? Multiple studies have shown that dietary cholesterol does not increase coronary artery disease. Researchers are calling for guidelines to be reconsidered but unfortunately many of us are still being treated under this perspective. Choles
terol is high because the body is under stress or there is some major hormonal deficiency.

  Your body makes roughly 2,000 – 3,000 milligrams of cholesterol a day. Diet change can only impact our cholesterol level by maybe 10%. Lots of you gave up eggs, shrimp and other healthy foods to have an impact on your cholesterol levels, and ultimately you were given statin drugs to lower your cholesterol—cholesterol your body needs. When I see high LDL on a guy’s lab, and he has low testosterone I know what the body is doing. The body says low testosterone? What do I need to make more? Cholesterol. I will be thrilled when we all understand how this works!

  High cholesterol is a sign that something in the body isn’t functioning properly and more cholesterol is needed to heal.

  The question is: what stress or hormonal deficiency is causing your body to create more cholesterol? I’m not going to drop it down with red yeast rice or statin drugs. I’m going to look into why it is high. It can be different based on the individual and very different based on gender. Anyone with chronic inflammation, stress, hormonal imbalances, autoimmune issues, leaky gut and many other health issues all NEED higher cholesterol levels to heal. The idea of creating an average or even an ideal level for cholesterol baffles me because levels can and should change dramatically when someone has some of those health issues. Cholesterol is the building block for all tissues and hormones in the body and is not a bad thing. High cholesterol is a sign that something in the body isn’t functioning properly and more cholesterol is needed to heal. Artificially lowering cholesterol with statin medication interferes with this healing process and makes people sicker.

  Cholesterol has many roles beyond hormones that we can be affecting if we are prescribing medications to lower it. Just by looking at a few of those roles we can see how critical cholesterol is to our Swiss watch.

  Cell membranes rely heavily on cholesterol. Every cell in our body is surrounded by a cell membrane. Cholesterol gives the cell membrane flexibility in addition to the strength and support necessary to maintain its shape.

  We need cholesterol for optimal nerve, brain and memory function. Our nerve cells are specialized cells that transmit information throughout the body. Cholesterol allows for faster and higher quality transmission of those signals. What part of the body has the highest cholesterol? The highest amount of cholesterol is found in the brain. The brain relies on cholesterol for overall function, specifically for memory formation and retention. You can see why cholesterol becomes even more important as we age, and we have a higher demand on our brain functions.

  Cholesterol is required for your body to make vitamin D. Cholesterol is a precursor for vitamin D production that is synthesized in the skin. Vitamin D is vital for your immunity along with your physical and mental well-being.

  Gall bladder function is heavily reliant on the help of cholesterol. Cholesterol is converted into bile salts allowing the digestive process to emulsify fats properly. Gall bladder surgeries are on the rise! I wonder how many gall bladder surgeries could be prevented if cholesterol levels supported normal bile salt production?

  Don’t govern your health care choices by fear.

  This is just scratching the surface of the importance of cholesterol and why we need it. I understand this is a big shift in understanding, and some of you may still fear cholesterol. Don’t govern your health care choices by fear. The drugs work on cholesterol, but the picture is so much bigger! More and more people are suffering the side effects of the drugs. It says right on the box that the side effects are low hormones, renal disease, depression, impotence and more. I see these effects in patients in my office every day. I disagree that people have to live a life on these drugs, suffering the side effects. There is a different path.

  Statins are shown to affect the heart. Statins interfere with the production of LDL which interfere with CoQ10. What organ does CoQ10 fuel? Your heart. Why would you take a drug for your heart that can have a bad effect on the heart? And we know it doesn’t just affect the heart. Studies show that statins lower testosterone. If you lower cholesterol, you lower testosterone which increases impotence. So, statins can cause drug induced impotence. Don’t worry, the drug company that makes one of the top-selling statins, Lipitor, also makes Viagra. If they make a problem, they have another drug to fix it. That’s big money-making in the billions. Even though it seems like common sense, we can see in studies and anecdotal evidence that lowering cholesterol negatively impacts steroid hormones.

  If a guy is taking a statin drug and his testosterone goes down, what are some of the side effects of the medication? Impotence, heart disease (the very thing it is supposed to help with), loss of motivation, weight gain. That’s all on the drug packet insert. Then, we have male enhancement drugs. Let’s think about that. They created the problem with one drug. Now they’ve created another drug to solve the problem created by the first drug. That’s what they know to do, but it’s not going to bring the results most people want. How many prescriptions do you need to be healthy?

  “My doctor says my hormones are low because of my age.” I hear that one a lot too as I travel across the country from women and men who are frustrated because of low hormones. For them, the hormones are low because they are on statins. When they get tested and follow their specific course of care, they find they can get off statin drugs and synthetic hormones and maintain hormonal balance. That’s when I say to them, “good thing you got younger, your hormones are balanced!” They look at me like I’m nuts and let me know they are actually older. They are indeed—I humorously use the comment, because age doesn’t have anything to do with it.

  You can maintain a normal hormone balance from the day you are born until the day you die.

  You can maintain a normal hormone balance from the day you are born until the day you die. The problem is, nobody is teaching anyone how cholesterol works, or how to keep hormones normal. Statin drugs are not just cholesterol lowering drugs, statin drugs manipulate the function of your liver’s ability to make cholesterol. Cholesterol is needed to make numerous cells including steroid hormones that help your organs regulate functions like blood pressure, reproductive characteristics, metabolism, immune system, and blood sugar.

  The use of statins has gone up, and the percentage of Americans with high cholesterol has gone down from 18.3% in 1999-2000 to 11% in 2013-2014. So why do we see rising heart disease and not lower? Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death in the United States for both men and women. Notice hormone concerns, depression and blood pressure are also going up. One in four Americans are taking statins and they want to increase that number. You can see the results now that we realize cholesterol isn’t the bad guy.

  If you are taking a statin drug, you may have lower cholesterol, but you can never achieve hormonal balance. This is just one part of the body, but as we know the Swiss watch principle means every part plays a role that can impact all the other parts. Stopping just one gear has a tremendous impact on the entire body.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Liver is a Machine

  Do you remember that movie, The Horse Whisperer? The one where the guy could figure out what was going on without them being able to say it? Well, one day, I had two different follow-up appointments with two different women. They each said to me, “You are like my own Hormone Whisperer.” After that I started to see it posted in comments online. I didn’t ask to be called that. It’s not that I don’t like the nickname. It’s kind of cool, but I worry people miss the point. You have made it far enough into the book to know that I don’t treat hormones. I disagree with the whole idea of looking at just the symptoms and treating those. I look at the whole body to find out what is happening with everything, including the hormones. It’s a Swiss watch. There are many organs that impact every piece of our overall health. What’s the secret that made me The Hormone Whisperer? The liver.

  The liver performs over 500 vital functions for the body.

  The liver is a machine and is very important for
the bigger picture. The liver performs over 500 vital functions for the body. The liver does way more than what people give it credit for. Most people just think of it as a detoxing organ, which is true. It clears out harmful toxins, like alcohol and medications from the blood. Every day our bodies are bombarded with all kinds of toxins in our food, clothing, body products, environment, and workplace that can overload our liver. It works hard for detoxing but there is so much more! It produces blood clotting factors and is needed for cholesterol production. The liver stores energy, vitamins, enzymes, and minerals like iron. Did know the liver is important for hormone conversion? It’s a converting machine!

  There is all this crazy stuff that happens in the liver to make up all those hormones that make up so much of who we are. They don’t just show up for work, they are created by your amazing body. So, we know that cholesterol is essential for steroid hormone production. We also know cholesterol is made in the liver, which is part one why the liver is important for healthy hormones, but it doesn’t end there. After being produced in the liver, the cholesterol is excreted into the blood. That cholesterol goes off to the adrenal glands and is made into pregnenolone. Pregnenolone is known as the mother hormone. Why is it the mother hormone? Let’s bring back that chart from the cholesterol chapter.

  If we lower cholesterol, we lower your pregnenolone which could leave your brain unprotected.

  See pregnenolone is the next step on that chart and pregnenolone has the opportunity to become all these different hormones. It is the precursor to estrogens, testosterone, progesterone, cortisol and all the other steroid hormones. How does that happen? Once pregnenolone is produced, it goes into the bloodstream. Some of it goes to the nervous system where it is used to make myelin sheath. The main job of the myelin sheath is to protect the important stuff like your brain. If we lower cholesterol, we lower your pregnenolone which could leave your brain unprotected. The rest of your pregnenolone eventually makes its way to the testicles or adrenals where it is converted into testosterone, and to the liver where it is converted into other steroid hormones. What is happening in the body and the liver can have an impact on what those hormones become.