[00:00:00] Jay Feldman: Excess estrogen is a problem, but you want to be careful with a lot of the advice out there for lowering estrogen and rebalancing your home runs. We'll be digging into why that is in today's episode of the energy balance podcast, a podcast where we explore health and nutrition from the bioenergetic view and teach you how to maximize your cellular energy to maximize your health.

In today's episode, we'll be going over whether estrogen is just a reproductive hormone. We'll discuss whether you need to be concerned about testosterone converting to estrogen. We'll also go over how you can have excess estrogen production even after menopause. We'll also be discussing the best way to use progesterone and whether calcium D glucarate is effective for lowering estrogen.

As always, to check out these studies, articles, and anything else I reference throughout today's episode, you can head over to jfeldmanwellness. com slash podcast. And with that, let's get started.

All right, so we're going to be digging in today, talking a little bit about estrogen and progesterone and some misconceptions here, some differing views, some advice that's out there that we've been getting a lot of questions about, mostly stemming from an interview with Wendy Sellins on the strong sisters.

Podcast they've had around four times up until this point, they did say that, they're going to be having around again. Obviously we won't be commenting here on any of those future interviews, which may be posted before this, but based on those interviews and also based on her website, which is estrogen dash free.

com, she's got a lot of unique takes and I've received a lot of questions about some of the claims that she made throughout these episodes throughout the interviews and on her. Website. So, I wanted to discuss that a little bit, discuss some of the kind of conflicting views here.

Because, a lot of the women who I work with are working on lowering estrogen, dealing with estrogen dominance, sometimes dealing with low progesterone or other hormone imbalance issues as well. And, some of the things that Wendy was saying don't really line up with our view here.

So I had a number of questions about that. So we want to discuss that. I will say off the bat, big picture wise, I think some things are definitely in agreement in terms of concerns with environmental estrogens, phytoestrogens from food, estrogen dominance as a whole. But there were quite a few things that she mentioned on the interviews that we have disagreements and that's what we'll Disagreements with, and that's what we'll be focusing on today.

It also seemed like Ashley Armstrong seemed to disagree with some of these things as well. She voiced that, especially on their fourth interview. And we'll see in the future interviews, if they discuss those differences a bit more, but anytime Ashley tried to bring it up, the, it was Avoided or I don't know.

They didn't really dig into those differences so much. So we'll see, but in any case, the point here and going through all of these kind of claims and different points that she makes is not to criticize her personally. We're not, this is not personal toward Wendy, not trying to disparage her or anything like that, but rather we just want to discuss these claims that she made that we would say are not accurate.

And, And can therefore be harmful if they're steering people in the wrong direction. So I just wanted to clarify those things. And yeah, that's pretty much everything on my end before we dig in. Anything you want to mention, Mike?

[00:03:21] Mike Fave: Yeah, I think those are great points, Jay. And I think this is something that we see a lot in the health sphere with multiple different personalities, gurus, authorities, et cetera, is there's often a ounce of truth.

And a portion of what people are saying, and some things are true and some things are legitimate and some things are quite helpful. And then there's other components that are maybe not a hundred percent supported or maybe aren't a hundred percent clear. And so I think it's important not to completely write everything off from somebody, but to be able to look at a particular viewpoint.

And pick and choose the components that are worthwhile or that makes sense, especially in today's time where you have quite a few different components or viewpoints being presented simultaneously. And I think that a lot of people become confused listening to all these various viewpoints and they feel like, oh, everything's contradictory and everybody has.

Their perspective on this and there's research to support everything. And what I would say is that I think there's actually a unifying thread or through all of these different points. If you're able to actually go in and discern the points that are really supported and that have a lot of validity behind them and then the points that are maybe less supported overall.

So for me, when I'm looking at what somebody's saying, I don't wholesale reject something. I'm open to listening at all the points and then I start to filter out which specific points I find useful and which specific points I find relevant and which specific points. I think are a bit questionable.

So with this type of information to this type of dynamic, I think, as you have mentioned, Jay, that there's quite a few points here. That Wendy makes that are helpful, but then I also think there's a couple areas as we're going to dig through that are possibly a bit problematic. So this is not a wholesale rejection of the perspective.

I think there's a quite a few areas where there would be agreement, but I do think there's some areas where we want to bring some clarity to help dispel the confusion for the audience for people watching, because what the comments under the videos and even for myself from what I've heard from my clients.

People are slightly confused by some of the components, especially because the strong sisters are their platform promotes a bioenergetic perspective. And then you have an individual who's coming on, and maybe has some elements of conflicting information. Even though they're being presented as an authority within this perspective on this particular platform.

So I think it's important to figure out the areas that aren't a hundred percent in alignment and explain through those so that people have clarity and there's still a uniformity in perspective overall. And that's what we're looking to do here today.

[00:06:09] Jay Feldman: Definitely, and as we'll get into at this first point, there's a place for picking and choosing for sure.

I think it's also worth noting that sometimes we're operating on very different frameworks of health and physiology, and this is one of those times where we're looking at things very differently in the deepest sense. And yes, there are some things that we agree with, but it's almost just by happenstance.

It's not because we're really looking at things in a similar way, and that's not always the case, right? Sometimes there's people who we think are looking at things really intelligently and carefully with complexity and really looking into the physiology and everything, but we still have some disagreements.

This is a bit different from that. Just because her the framework she's coming from is not well, I think there are some significant flaws with it or concerns with it. And so we'll just dig into that first one, which she makes these points throughout all of the interviews, which makes it really muddy because we're really talking about totally different things when we say things like physiology.

Or biology or biochemistry from what she is. So one of these kind of through lines that she had that she discusses is how any standard considerations of physiology, anything you're reading in studies, anything in the textbooks is entirely irrelevant because it's all funded by the pharmaceutical industry.

It's all funded by, the Rockefellers and. There's no validity to those things. It's all been corrupted. That's the idea. And, there were times when, Ashley would press her on something and she would say that's not basically the kind of excuse or the reason why she was saying she was wrong is basically that, everyone else is lying.

They're all stuck in this. Rockefeller driven medical mindset, including Ray Pete. And, you should only be believing me, like all these other people are either lying or they're just fully stuck in the matrix. And what I'm saying here, this isn't my beliefs. This is reality. This is physiology.

I'm the only one who knows physiology. We're going to take 10 years to unlearn everything, it's this really condescending authoritarian type perspective. And there's no real, The point here, again, is not to have an argument with her about this, because we're talking about two totally different views of health.

One where you're basically discounting everything except what fits your narrative and another where you're just trying to look objectively at what we do know, considering that yes, there is industry influence and that's something always to consider when it comes to any. Anything in terms of health and physiology, like we need to consider that.

But if we're just discounting all physiology, we don't really have anything to go off of. And that's, I think concerning and that's part of why she makes a lot of claims that don't really have any sort of. Substantial support for them at all. And we'll talk about those that basically every form of evidence really is against some of these claims.

So that's one thing I want to mention there. One other point I want to make here is she makes those points as if the quote physiology as she's discussing is independent of this Rockefeller funded medical industrial complex, yet everything she discusses. In terms of estrogen, progesterone, she talks about receptors a lot.

All of those things are born out of the same, the exact same industry. They're all these discoveries are within the last a hundred years, even the entire theory behind receptors. This is something we've talked about a little bit before, there, there's entire paradigms or entire alternative and competing theories with that, like the association induction hypothesis by Gilbert Ling, which it sounds like she's not aware of.

But if you were to say. If you're going to talk positively about the impact of receptors or that, if there's no receptors, there's no way for a tissue to have a response to a hormone or something like that is fully nested in a, Rockefeller medical industrial complex theory, not to mention that even estrogen and progesterone themselves have been discovered in the last hundred years with, under the same funding, the same research institutes and everything.

If we're throwing this all away, how do you even know estrogen exists at all? It's obviously not a strong argument, but just worth pointing out some of these really clear flaws and pointing out how differently we're looking at health and physiology just as a starting place, because And there's no point in really discussing that side much further, because we just want to evaluate the claims and help people out to recognize where those differences are, as opposed to focusing on this and what her actual arguments or support are, because they're all, operate on the same foundation.

[00:10:43] Mike Fave: I think it's it's quite an interesting perspective to make an assumption that Dr. Pete was on board with the Rockefeller medical complex and the pharmaceutical industry perspective. When his, some of his primary foundational tenants were arguing against the frameworks that the medical industry was using to actually justify their treatments and their therapies.

And I think there's articles by Dr. P where he directly discusses the usage of this imagery around mechanistic lock and key type receptor functions as a way to actually market drugs. And then he starts to bring that into question and starts to talk about the under the idea that a substance can fundamentally interact with the cellular state and have a wide ranging effect outside of a particular receptor function or outside of any type of specific reductionistic pathway.

And this is something that we're starting to see now. And before I even get to that it's not that this is a wholesale rejection of the receptor ideology or that you can't have discrete mechanistic pathways being transduced throughout a cellular process. It's, that's not the case, but, or you don't have to fully reject that.

But at the same time, what we're starting to see with the work of people like Dr. Michael Levin and the electrical fields is that you can have of mass effect on an entire physiologic process through field generation, and I would assume that different substances and components will affect that as well.

And this is not it's not like a woo type of thing. It's no, this is, you can directly test this and see this with some of the work that you're seeing with bioelectrical fields. So I think In general, the critique around Dr. Pete in this area, or like that, the, that nobody else is discussing this and that you have to fundamentally reject physiology overall, because these components are embedded, I think is, highly problematic.

And it basically would leave you with no tool set to actually understand and put together a picture of what's going on. Physiologically, you need to have some type of image, some type of representation in your mind of how things work. And so using a lock and key perspective or these mechanistic perspectives are helpful.

They came out of a timeframe when mechanistic perspectives and understanding of machines was I think at a forefront with industrialization. So the analogies that are used are similar. It doesn't mean that they're fully correct, but they are a way to try to understand what's going on, make sense of things.

And I wouldn't fully reject them. Especially if you're trying not to make sense of what's going on and go through the literature and research that we already have, which essentially, at the end of the day, a lot of research is essentially saying, Hey, if we do X, Y, and Z thing on these, this sample of animals or humans or whatever the thing is, what is the particular outcome and these particular metrics?

So you're just basically you're trying to take experiences. From this other place this other time and distill principles from it and then use those principles in different circumstances. So to fundamentally reject that because you don't agree with the analogy that's used to describe that I think is leaving a lot on the table.

That is, would be quite problematic in terms of making sense of things. So I think this is where, this is where this, these ideas that are coming in that you have to, reject all of these components, all of research, cause it's all medically funded. It's all a industry funded. It's all garbage.

It's yeah, there is some of that, but to say Oh, we're just going to get rid of all of it, I think would be a grave error in the long run.

[00:14:22] Jay Feldman: And then what are you going to base anything on at that point? How can you make any of the claims? made that she makes if you're not basing it on anything that has happened in the last hundred years within research and biology and physiology.

So yeah. And it's interesting. You mentioned Michael Levin research and his work and it's particularly relevant here considering that he was using progesterone or he has used progesterone to create these effects totally independent of any receptors. Which of course is directly flying in the face of the the, that general idea.

So moving on here, one, one claim that Wendy makes throughout these interviews many times. No she repeats it in the same kind of authoritarian way. Even when someone might have some, the strong sisters might have some sort of a disagreement about it, or they mentioned something, but she continually says that the reproductive hormones only affect the reproductive organs.

Mike, do you want to start us off here and explain some of the issues with this?

[00:15:20] Mike Fave: Yeah. At the core of this is just blatantly untrue. So we already know the effects of multiple difference and multiple different steroid hormones, reproductive hormones, the different hormonal systems in general, having a wide range of effects on multiple tissues.

Secondary sexual characteristics, which are more than just what happens to the penis, the testicles. The vagina, the ovaries, the uterus, et cetera. It like there's other components that are involved in terms of skin quality, in terms of cardiovascular risk, in terms of what going on with body hair production and things like this.

So just fundamentally off the bat, without even looking at research, you can see that the sex steroids have wide ranging effects on the tissues. Now, all you have all of this stuff going on in the sports world about the different genders and who can participate in what. And I'm not, I don't want to dig into any of that, but I just want to use this as an example here that if you have exposure to sex steroids, like androgens, just as an example, it has a massive effect on muscle strength, muscle, muscular ability, bone strength, overall musculoskeletal size, and things like this that create an advantage inside sports for biological males versus biological females.

So these are huge differences. And this is born out through the sex steroids, just as an example. And I think that just looking at these things alone, besides even digging into the research and looking, okay, if you have the, what are the post menopausal, what are the effects of estradiol and progesterone on post menopausal tissues and maintaining bone mass or affecting vascular function?

Or increasing the risk of different cancers or decreasing those risks, whatever the different components are. Basically, what you can see is yes, it's obvious that these hormones have an effects on other tissues outside of just the reproductive organs. And this is it. You can see this with your own eyes.

If you think about your own life your development through puberty. the differences between men and women and multiple different senses. And then even if you go into the research, which yes, so a portion of it is properly funded by different medical industries, but you can see inside the research that there's multiple wide ranging effects of the sex steroids on many different tissues inside the body.

And in fact, Many different tissues are locally producing these steroids for a variety of functions, including your fat tissues, including your neural tissues, your nervous system, your central nervous system, including the muscle tissues, et cetera. And the skin as well as another target, another organ that has a massive amount of productive capabilities for steroid hormones.

So to come from, to have a statement or a perspective that the sex steroids are just affecting or being produced. By the reproductive systems or the reproductive hormones is I think factually incorrect. It's obviously incorrect. And so I think as a foundation, like we want to dispel that from the start and say even menopausally.

The adrenal glands and the fat tissue are producing the precursors and the actual estrogens that are present in those states. And you can have women who have estrogen dominance driven by having a high amount of adipose tissue and can that adipose tissue converting adrenal androgens into estradiol, estrone.

So these are things that if you blanketly cut off this idea that's possible, then you're leaving a lot of areas on the table where you can make changes and improve your health overall by saying, Oh yeah, it's only producing these organs or Oh yeah, it can only affect these organs. No, like they have this wide ranging effects.

And if you say, look, they don't, then now you don't have modalities to help improve your health in multiple different ways or understand what's fundamentally going wrong in menopause versus premenopause or in men that are dealing with andropause or low testosterone or whatever the different circumstances are.

So again, fundamentally, the tenants that form the foundational principles of your framework, if those things are faulty, Then all the dominoes down the line will be faulty. And then that can create issues and how you're able to help people. So it's important to understand what are your foundational frameworks and principles.

And this, we are starting with this one, I think, because if this is wrong, it'll affect many things downstream.

[00:19:32] Jay Feldman: Yeah, absolutely. And that's such an important point. If we're diminishing the effects of these hormones to just the reproductive hormones, for one, as you're saying very clearly, this does not align with firsthand obvious experiences, right?

Puberty is a great example. As you said, it's not like that only affects the reproductive hormones. You're going to see changes and In bone and muscle in hair growth in non reproductive areas as well. There's tons of things that change during puberty, which is important. It's also something that, women experience every month, right?

This is almost like denying the experiences of. 50 percent of the population that the reproductive hormone fluctuations during your cycle can affect your mood, can affect your digestion, can affect water retention, swelling, bloating can affect your like mental clarity and emotional states.

It's And then you add on top of that, so on one hand we have this clear experience and then you add on top of that all of the research showing that hormones have, and again, whether we're talking estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, you'd see direct effects on mitochondrial function, on cancer growth, on histamine production direct effects in the brain, in the gut and the muscle and the adipose tissue, direct effects on other hormones as well by stimulating different areas of the brain to increase, serotonin or prolactin or cortisol.

It's It's this vast, intricate web, which is worth considering because this is why you can feel so much worse if you're dealing with hormone imbalances. This is why it can affect your propensity for gaining weight or, an inability to put on muscle or tons of other issues, even to the point of, contributing to the growth of things like cancer in non reproductive areas as well.

So it's important. It's extremely important to consider, and it's worth mentioning here that if you are dealing with hormone imbalances or estrogen dominance, or if you're just looking to optimally support your metabolism, lose weight, improve your digestion, get amazing sleep, boost your energy, and so much more with clear action steps and strategies, Alongside personalized guidance with me or from me, then head over to J Feldman wellness.

com slash solution, where you can find all of the information for the energy balance solution program. This program includes customized health coaching and includes a video library with videos. On how to restore gut health, how to regulate your blood sugar, how to lose weight without destroying your metabolism how to improve your sleep.

And also, specific videos on how to balance your hormones, how to lower estrogen if you're dealing with excess estrogen, how to identify that, how to properly utilize progesterone if it's appropriate, how to identify if it is appropriate. There's also resources like a sample meal plan, recipes, supplement guide, as well as a private community.

So again, head over to jfeldmanwellness. com slash solution to check out all the details. But yeah, with that, just to round this out here, as far as the reproductive hormones only affecting the reproductive organs. It's her basis for this, what Wendy mentions is these, this kind of firsthand experience from this doctor that she apparently studied under Dr.

Hobbins. She says that he has, he did experiments to show that there aren't receptors in these non reproductive areas. Although I've, I couldn't find anything published from him about that. He has other published literature on using thermography for like a breast cancer screening and things like that, but didn't see anything about the receptors not to mention again, as we already mentioned, just because there's not a receptor doesn't mean there's not actually an impact, but also according to all the literature that is replicated by people who are funded by different industries or not funded by different industries, it is pretty universally agreed that there are effects in all of these different tissues and it's, as we said, pretty clear based on experience as well.

So I don't want to add too much else there. I want to be able to move on to the next one here, but was there anything you wanted to mention real quick, Mike?

[00:23:29] Mike Fave: It's just, it's funny that you have this dynamic where this doctor that she studied under, again, I didn't look at his, this unpublished research that she mentioned, but we can't the reproductive hormones don't have an effect on target tissues because they don't have receptors.

But we can't look at any of the physiologic research because it was funded by the Rockefellers and by the drug companies. And the thing is that semi paradoxical? Because the receptor ideology around how a hormone or a drug affects a cell or a tissue was born out of the pharmaceutical industries funded research because it was a way to explain how the drugs were going to work to solve these particular problems.

It's if you take X, Y, and Z substance, it'll affect this receptor on the cell that will transduce through this pathway inside the cell. So it's it's a very interesting dynamic to claim that since we don't see receptors in this other area that we're not going to have this target effect, but then claim that we can't look at any research funded by the medical industry.

And the Rocca for any of the Rockefeller medicine. When that the ideology that you're using to justify your point was an analogy borne out from that type of research, right? It's it's a contradiction.

[00:24:48] Jay Feldman: Absolutely. Not to mention the flip side of that is that, again, there's this re, the pharmaceutical industry uses that same.

idea to propagate the notion that this chemical drug, hormone, whatever it is, can't have negative effects in these other areas because there's not receptors. I think that is fully born out of the same idea and it's exactly what she's sharing here. She's saying basically that exact thing that they use to basically gaslight you into thinking that there can't be negative effects in these other areas or any effects in these other areas if there's not receptors.

Yep. Yep. Moving on to the next claim here. This one is just going to be really quick because it's. There's not too much to add. It's just one that's really blatant and I think a good example of how we're thinking about things very differently. So she makes the claim that you don't actually produce estrogen during pregnancy.

She also says that the only times you do produce estrogen are between puberty and. And menopause, but after menopause, you don't before puberty. You don't, those things are also we'll talk about that in a second. But she said very clearly multiple times, you do not produce estrogen during pregnancy.

And the strong sisters, I think again, it was Ashley brought up. That there are major changes in blood levels of estrogen during pregnancy. And it seemed like Wendy wasn't aware of that. And her response was that it must be due to all of these exogenous sources of estrogen and all the phytoestrogens we're consuming.

That must be increasing our estrogen levels during pregnancy. And don't, again, I don't think she was necessarily aware of the changes in estradiol levels during pregnancy, but there's no conceivable way that it's caused by exogenous estrogen. So just to throw some numbers out in general, depending on where a woman is in their cycle, estradiol levels can be between 10 and 400 picograms per milliliter.

That's, again, in the normal range by the third trimester of pregnancy, the normal range is 8, 500 to 30, 000 picograms per milliliter. So we're talking about an increase of over 8, 000 picograms per milliliter, an increase of what over 20 times. And that would be the low end of the range.

The reality is it's probably going to be much more. Normally the average is already around 8, 000 by the second trimester. The third trimester, typically average is much higher. I don't remember exactly what the average value is, but in that range. And so the idea, I don't know, it's again, a throwaway, but it's just reason to be suspect of somebody making claims like this

[00:27:14] Mike Fave: especially an estrogen expert, right?

[00:27:16] Jay Feldman: And especially also considering the levels go down after pregnancy. They don't stay at, 10, 12, 15, 000, 20, 000 picograms per milliliter. And it's not like they just stopped their exogenous exposure or something like that. It would be insane to, for all your life, be exposed to the same things.

And then just during, six to after six to, eight months, you're all of a sudden seeing this massive increase in estrogen is just.

[00:27:40] Mike Fave: That's also only estradiol. That's not even talking about estriol or estrone. And then on top of that, I think to make a statement like that for me, it indicates perhaps a fundamental misunderstanding or lack of understanding.

Potentially. I, again, I've never spoken to this lady, so I don't know where she's at with this stuff, but. of what estrogen is actually doing. Like, why is estradiol, or estrogens in general, bumping up during pregnancy? And why do they spur in tissue growth in, to the extent that you may see cancer? Or why do you see, why is adipose tissue producing it?

Or why do you see it at sites of injury? And I think Dr. Pete had called it the hormone of new beginnings. And he also mentioned that it was a stress hormone. So it's the general idea. And this is where the frame, the lens that Dr. Pete had created around understanding of different hormones was so useful, at least for me.

And it was the idea that estrogen was a hormone that promoted growth. That promoted tissue growth that promoted cell growth, renewal, things like this. And progesterone was a hormone that promoted differentiation. So you make all these different cells and then you can, then the progesterone was almost like the track that says, look, you're going to be a heart cell.

You're going to be a lung cell. You're going to be a skin cell and made sure that the cells didn't just move into unchecked growth. Whereas and this is the problem with some of the estrogen dominant again, like these things are a balance to some extent. You're going to have estrogen at all stages of life for different circumstances and different purposes.

But the general lens that you can understand it through is if I have an injury locally at this particular tissue, I may see a rise in things like histamine and things like estradiol and things like the opioid signaling molecules and things like cytokines. And it's they are signaling a particular circumstance that is occurring locally.

And then adjusting resource utilization to solve that problem. So now we have this lens, this overarching perspective of these hormones and understanding how they work in different contexts and what they're being used for in pregnancy. Why are we seeing massive spikes in estrogen levels? Cause you're growing an entirely new organism.

You're basically triggering massive cell growth overall. But you also see. Massive rises in progesterone as well, which is directing those cells in a particular circumstance. And as an example, as you mentioned, Jay, with Dr. Michael Levin's work, what were they using the progesterone for with their models, with the bioelectrical fields to regenerate different tissues was differentiation, cellular differentiation.

If we put a field on these cells and we expose them to progesterone, we can increase the growth and production of these cells and progesterone help with the differentiation process. At least that's my rudimentary understanding of that particular experiment off the top of my head. But that was the general idea.

And it's with this foundational paradigm understood that this type of hormone progesterone is driving differentiation. This type of hormone estradiol is driving growth overall. And so that's why you're seeing this circumstance inside. Pregnancy, we're seeing these high levels. So to say Oh, it's probably just exogenous estrogen is like for me is indicating a fundamental misunderstanding of what estrogen is there for.

Is it just this terrible hormone that we all want to be scared of? And we all want to avoid not necessarily our high amounts of problem. Yeah. Is an imbalance a problem? Yeah. It's the same thing with cortisol to DHEA. It's the same thing with reverse T3 and T3. What we are looking at with the hormones is we are looking at the signals and we are, they are giving us an indication of the state of the body, a history of the physiology to some extent.

And then we're trying to determine what that means in this individual's context. So yes, our phytoestrogens or xenoestrogens or endocrine disrupting estrogen like chemicals problematic. Of course. They are that's where it's yeah, we agree with this, but the fundamental lens that we're seeing here is this is a little bit off base.

I would say from my perspective overall.

[00:31:47] Jay Feldman: Yeah. And I think that's a great point. And as you're saying there's absolutely need for estrogen for growth. And that's why we see it. At times of growth, especially when a fetus is developing, especially during growth of an adolescent before puberty, there is still estrogen there.

It needs to be there as a part of the growth pathway. So yeah, great point again, whether we're talking cortisol, estrogen, histamine, serotonin, there's a place for these things. We don't necessarily want zero, and if you had zero, you would have an inability to respond to the stress that or issues in your environment that you are inevitably going to encounter.

That doesn't mean that we want to maximize those things. We can still have imbalances. There can still be issues with excess, but they also still play fundamental roles. In response to stress, but also a normal development as well. So yeah,

[00:32:35] Mike Fave: just a quick tack on it or Jane. I know you want to move forward.

So very quick. The problem that I think and the problem that we have in that dr. Pete had with some of these components. It wasn't to say that you want to absolutely never have them. It was that the general culture and the general models are looking to optimize for them. And that was the fundamental problems, right?

It's like the idea that. Serotonin is a happy hormone and we need to optimize the levels that are produced. Or estrogen is the true female hormone and we need to make sure that we have, make sure women have as exposure as much estrogen as possible. So the stance that for me, when I see Dr. Pete's work, the stance that he takes, Is it's like trying to buffer this extreme movement towards this other direction for these hormones that fundamentally are necessary, but also fundamentally are problematic it, especially if you're looking to maximize them and that you do see that in the research as well, right?

That's where you saw that estrogen only therapies led to problems. And again, it's through the understanding this perspective. So I did want to leave that there because that's, that is something that gets brought up in the sphere quite a bit around this type of stuff. People say, Dr. Pete had black and white perspectives.

And it's I think it's more of a hedge against how extreme the other side was, at least that was my take.

[00:33:48] Jay Feldman: Yeah. Yeah. I think also people have a tendency to interpret in a black and white way despite the amount of nuance that someone might provide.

[00:33:56] Mike Fave: That is true.

[00:33:59] Jay Feldman: So this one, I'm just going to, we're going to touch on in a quick 30 seconds.

She makes a claim that testosterone cannot convert to estrogen. She mentioned it very briefly in one of the interviews and it's also on her website. Again, just to mention this really quickly, because I think it is something that's important to Kind of quote dispel assuming that we don't literally throw out everything that's been that we have learned as Including the discovery of testosterone and estrogen and all that in the last hundred years.

This is very clearly not true There's you know, and you can see this pretty clearly But there's a nice graphic here to show it which is basically that the only way to produce the estrogens is through the androgens And that includes either testosterone or androstenedione. There's no other way to do it like physiologically in humans.

That's how we produce estrogens. So to say that is impossible or doesn't happen again is I think in some ways dangerous because it's a consideration that people should have if they're using testosterone or other androgens. It's a really important one and it's also just incorrect. So we'll leave that one there and jump into the next one real quick here, which is very similar to the idea that the reproductive hormones only affect the reproductive organs here.

She states that estrogen is only produced in the reproductive or in the reproductive organs. It's not produced elsewhere. And this is an important one for a couple of reasons. One is that she mentions this too, which is odd, but she, because she talks about estrogen dominance still being an issue.

later in life and still using progesterone. But it's important to recognize that estrogen can still be produced after menopause, even though the, it's not going to be produced in the ovaries or another reproductive organs. And that's really important to consider because that can be a major driver of an estrogen dominant or hormone imbalance type issue at that stage is the estrogen that your bodies are producing.

It's not all exogenous. And so I'm going to share a couple of quick quotes here explaining that the first one is from a book titled biology of aromatase and they state aromatase expression occurs in many organs, including the ovary, placenta, hypothalamus, liver, muscle, adipose tissue, and the cancerous breast tissue itself in postmenopausal women.

Estrogen synthesis takes place nearly exclusively in the extra glandular tissues through the androstenedione estrone pathway. Postmenopausal women produce approximately 100 milligrams of estrone per day and more if they're obese. And then we have a very similar quote here, which again, I think is worth sharing, when we're talking about takeaways and application here, this is really central.

And so this is from an a study titled sources of estrogen and their importance. And they state in premenopausal women, the ovaries are the principal sources of estradiol, which functions as a circulating hormone to act on distal target tissues. However, in postmenopausal women, when the ovaries cease to produce estrogen and in men, this is no longer the case because estradiol is no longer solely in endocrine factor.

Instead, it is produced in a number of ExtraGen AAL sites and acts locally at these sites as a pericrine or even inin factor. These sites include the mesenchymal cells of the adipose tissue, including that of the breast.

The importance of this unique aspect of the tissue specific regulation of aroma taste expression Lies in the fact that the low circulating levels of estrogen, which are observed in post menopausal women, have little bearing on the concentrations of estrogen in, for example, a breast tumor, which can reach levels at least one order of magnitude greater than those present in circulation due to local synthesis within the breast.

Thus, the estrogen, which is responsible for breast cancer development, for the maintenance of bone mineralization, and for the maintenance of cognitive function, is not circulating estrogen, but rather that which is produced locally at these specific sites within the breast, bone, and brain. Of course, we don't necessarily agree with everything here in terms of estrogen being necessary for supporting those areas, but Definitely worth mentioning here.

Two things. One is you can absolutely not only can you, but you do absolutely still produce estrogen even after menopause, it still has biological effects and looking in the blood is not representative of the estrogen activity of the tissue, which is incredibly important because so many of the women I see who are put on estrogen, hormone replacement therapy, it's based on looking at the levels in the blood.

Not to mention that they're not looking at really effective or good markers of estrogen in the blood, but yeah, so I just wanted to highlight those things.

[00:38:22] Mike Fave: Yeah, I think the, one of the number one things to keep in mind here is that for both of these past points, one of the number one sites for production of estrogens is the adipose tissue and in men.

The adipose tissue is one of the major sites for the conversion of testosterone into estradiol or into estrogens in general. So the more body fat you have within a certain part, within a certain range, the more you're going to convert your androgens into estrogens as a man and also as a woman and postmenopausal women who have a high fat mass have a high conversion of the, it could be their adrenally derived androgens like DHEA.

into estrogens, particularly estrone. And then you can also see that the ratio of different types of estrones can affect what's going on with the metabolism and the different cellular states. So this is, if you fund, if you fundamentally knock out the idea from the get go, that androgens like testosterone can't convert into estrogens and that estrogens only affect these specific tissues and that they can only be created by the reproductive tissues.

Then you won't be able to see this idea that, Oh, a high amount of body fat, whether for men or whether postmenopausal woman can actually be a major source of estrogen production and fundamentally be a problem for people's health and for women's health. And it's okay, so then you won't be able to tell a woman to, to what's going on with their hormonal pathways.

Cause she also like blatantly writes off testing, whether that's Dutch testing, whether that's a serum testing of hormones in the interviews and have a way to actually adjust these things. It's nope, we're so it's if you eliminate all of that, it's how do we fix this?

How do we help people? How do we help clients? How do I help my clients to actually. Solve these problems. And so for me, it's I need to have modalities. I need to have frameworks and they need to be validated in order for me to be comfortable telling my clients, Hey, this is a strategy that we have this research on that shows this effect that has these benefits it's working in this particular type of way, and here's how we can assess it.

And so that's, she's the fundamentally cutting that off actually takes treatment options out of people's hands. And so it's not that we just want to do something to have treatment options because we want to make sure that the things that we are doing are correct. And the testing that we're doing is correct, but to eliminate an entire.

Lens or framework or principle from the get go without any source of validation for the statement or the perspective, and then cut out this entire way to manage these problems, I think is problematic and possibly doing a disservice. This doesn't to say that other metrics are important to use as well, like a woman's symptoms.

Those are extremely important to gauge in combination with a lab set in combination with other lifestyle factors and to triangulate between all of these different components. All of that is absolutely essential. But again, like we also want to be doing things where we have validated information and then using multiple modalities simultaneously.

Oftentimes with women that I'm working with, I'll be looking at their lifestyle. I'll be looking at their diet. I'll be looking at their hormones and then I'll be making adjustments based on their symptoms, their hormones and changes to all of these different areas for their particular outcome and their goal.

So I'm trying to take as many different options as I can to have as many tools that I have in my toolkit to resolve. Somebody's health problems or their health challenges as that are supported and that I can gauge the effectiveness from that's an extremely valuable thing to do. So for me, I take problem with this particular perspective because it's cutting, trying to cut this idea out without actually giving people without actually supporting the cutting of it out without supporting the reasons why we're actually cutting out.

Oh, it's just Rockefeller funded. And then like a bunch of statements that aren't supported. It's that is problematic because now people are going to say, Oh I shouldn't be doing this. I shouldn't be doing that and creating confusion where it's no, there, you may be in the right area. And so this is where I vetting the information and the lens with which the person's coming from, I think is absolutely essential.

[00:42:27] Jay Feldman: Yeah, absolutely. And that, that's a perfect segue into the next thing I wanted to talk about, which is calcium D glucorate. And it's a perfect example of another one where she says, that this actually increases estrogen instead of lowering it, it's not effective, don't use it. She, recommend, she doesn't recommend against it.

She basically she does. And she says that it's actually increasing estrogen as opposed to decreasing it. And this was a source of a lot of questions for me because, women in my programs, I often suggest using things like calcium deglucarate to help with estrogen symptoms. Because it's actually supported by the physiology and the research and I've seen it, benefit them immensely in terms of symptoms.

It's not always appropriate. It depends on the scenario, but she, this is a good example of the issues with the framework and the, danger or harms of applying a really, I don't know, a framework that's really off. And so she makes this claim on her website and she, I think mentioned it really briefly in one of the interviews about calcium D glucarate and her support of it is this two minute YouTube video that shows three before and after thermographies of women's breasts and showing either that there was no change or an increase in vascularity after one year of using some combination of different supposed anti estrogen products, including DIM, myomin, and calcium D glucarate.

Now, it's so odd to be against any research and then to use this extremely poorly controlled anecdotal evidence as your support. The whole reason for research is to do this exact same thing, to see clinical outcomes, but with actual control, right? Have a group of people who all use calcium deglucrate and a group who don't and see what the difference in the outcome is instead of having people randomly using different things, having a ton of other uncontrolled variables, and then using three.

Kind of case studies that don't actually even support your point. And I think again, she Go ahead, Mike.

[00:44:21] Mike Fave: Is it that we are to think that somebody who blankly eliminates research doesn't understand how research works? , ,

[00:44:29] Jay Feldman: ? No, it's not .

[00:44:31] Mike Fave: I always say that because it's like, yeah, of course.

She like, of this is what I would've been expected. ,

[00:44:36] Jay Feldman: right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And. Yeah, so that's, I just want to touch real briefly on calcium deglucrate just to provide the actual alternative here, which is a little bit about how it works and the fact that it is shown to be effective for the exact things that she's saying that it does the opposite.

So basically calcium deglucrate, the part of it that's beneficial here is the glucuric acid. It's not really about the calcium itself. And the glucaric acid gets converted into D glucaro 1, 4 lactone. That's the kind of active metabolite which inhibits an enzyme called beta glucuronidase. Beta glucuronidase basically I should even back up.

So when we're detoxifying things like estrogen, One of the pathways through which we do it is the glucuronidation pathway, where we attach glucuronic acid to the estrogen, essentially, and that allows it to be excreted, in this case, through the bile, and then it, we excrete it through the intestines, through our stool.

There's an enzyme called beta glucuronidase that breaks up the estrogen from the glucuronic acid, and so the beta glucuronidase breaks these up, and that allows for the estrogen to be reabsorbed, and this can happen both in the intestines, where it gets reabsorbed, or it can happen in tissues like the liver.

the liver, where before it gets excreted, it can be separated again. And then you have that estrogen staying in the liver and you can effectively detoxify it. So the calcium deglucorate works by preventing beta glucuronidase, that enzyme that prevents detoxification for estrogen. In other words, it helps with estrogen detoxification.

And This has been shown to have a ton of benefits and that's because this enzyme that prevents the detoxification of estrogen is increased in all sorts of different inflammatory states and calcium D. Glucrate prevents that, which allows it to have anti estrogenic effects and anti cancer effects as well.

And to say that it's estrogenic and there to when there's literally no conceivable mechanism through which it could be is also just again, equally expected with, when we're talking about this kind of evidence, but I just wanted to share real quick a study looking at calcium D glucarate in terms of estrogenic cancer.

It's a study titled Dietary Glucarate as anti promoter of 7 12 dimethylbenzanthracene induced mammary tumorogen. Tumor, tumorogenesis, using using the 7 12 dimethylbenzathrazine model of mammary tumor induction in rats. It is shown for the first time that feeding the rats calcium D glucrate supplemented diet after treatment with the carcinogen inhibits tumor development by over 70%.

And then they looked at the effects on estradiol and they state thus the serum estradiol and urinary 17 keto steroid levels were reduced 23 percent and 55 percent respectively. So 23 percent reduction in estradiol and they state the serum level of estradiol was in fact reduced to a level comparable to that of young rats.

of a strain more resistant to chemical mammary carcinogenesis. So basically restored estrogen back to normal levels when it was increased in the case of basically the breast tumors, breast cancer. I'll let you go ahead, Mike.

[00:47:36] Mike Fave: I think that this is, these are great points. The one thing I will say about that study is that in the rats, at least they require a bit of a higher dose to see that level of estrogen reduction.

So that is something to keep in mind. I think it was like 4 percent of the diet, but the other thing I'll mention, it doesn't, that doesn't mean that the calcium D glucrate isn't helpful though. So I'm not saying that it's just the, you may not see like a massive drop in your estrogen levels, but that the rats saw with the calcium D glucrate, cause you'd have to have a higher dose to really.

massively inhibit the enzyme. But the other thing to mention, cause a lot of people will see, I think the power of the thermo thermographic scans that she shows on her blog is that you could see this before and after, and you can see the vasculature and you're like, Oh, wow, it made things worse. But there's something you can consider here is that there are other components being used.

You're using DIM, diindylmethane, and you're also using the the myelmin, which is a combination of other herbal compounds. Now, here's the thing about herbal compounds. Herbal compounds are a mixed bag on their effect on different receptors. receptors and functions inside the body, right? So they affect progestogens or progesterone receptors, estrogen receptors, androgen receptors in all different types of ways.

And so some of the compounds there like diendylmethane will shift the metabolism of estrogen and estrone away from problematic metabolites. However, the other effects, depending on the dose of the DIM, What's the other name for it? The abbreviated name for it is that it does have effects on multiple different enzymatic systems as well and does have some mixed bag effects depending on the dose on the estrogen receptors itself.

And then the other component myomin I think was a combination of astragalus and some other components. And so depending on the different active ingredients inside these herbs, you may be getting a mixed bag effect on the estrogen progesterone receptors. And so to just signal out or single out calcium deglucarate without looking at these other factors is a problem.

And so the correct way to look at this in the gauge calcium deglucarates effectiveness in these models would be to just do calcium deglucarate. Just do the myelomin or just the individual components. Just do the DIMM and then start doing combinations after that. Because right now you have a scenario where you don't know which thing is the problem.

You can sit there and say, yeah, maybe it's calcium deglucorate and possibly it was. But the other thing is, you don't, you won't be able to know for sure. And this is why it would be better to go one thing at a time and also a population of three people is, or a sample size of three people, Is not really that indicative, especially if the other areas haven't been standardized.

So I know the images can be quite convincing to see before and after, and I'm not saying that I know for sure that it wasn't the calcium deglucarate in this particular scenario, but from a probability perspective, when you are looking at the effects of calcium deglucarate, how it's actually working, what it actually does, and you're seeing that you have an uncontrolled setup.

with three different substances and the other substances are known to have a mixed bag of effects. For me, that seems what is the lowest probability option of making things worse based on these examples would be the calcium deglucarate in my perspective. However, if you really want to know, then you would test it out, right?

So then you could test out the different circumstance with just the calcium deglucarate and see the before and after over X period of time on the thermography. And then add the other components. And again, you also validate the thermography as a way to actually determine if that is, is giving us a sense of the estrogenicity of a substance or not.

Is a thermography by itself going to be the best way to determine this? Could it be a factor in a series of metrics? Yes. Is it the best factor by itself? We would have, I'd have to see, look into the research and see. And this is where I think when you're going through the information, really dialing in and understanding specifics is essential.

And that's whether, that's even if you're going to look at your own hormonal state or any supplementation that you're using as an individual, dialing into the specifics, And personalizing things to your context and understanding the effects of the individual component becomes key. And this is where you start to see the difference and changes in your health.

And for me, this is, for me, that's what made the difference for me. That's what that makes the difference for my clients is getting into these specifics and dialing in these components and figuring these things out and getting a high level sense of priority and probability of what's moving the needle and what's not.

And then figuring out metrics in which you can test it, which in this circumstance, this is not what's happening. And I think And then you just have some like convincing pictures because you can see the difference, but it's not clear as what the actual underlying causes. And these are, this is important to dial in if in order to get a sense of what's going on and break that confusion, which is why we're doing, why we made this video, why we talked about these components.

Both of us got clients asking us about all of this type of stuff after this video. So it was like, all right, let's dig into the details here.

[00:52:28] Jay Feldman: Yeah. Thanks Absolutely. And one thing to mention real quick, again, talking about things that would actually make it a worthwhile study. We would also need a control group of people who have the vascularity issues to start with, and then see how those change over time.

Because if you have a group that already has issues, already has estrogenic issues and you add one supplement, of course, the majority might still get worse if they're not doing enough to actually reverse it. And that's another huge confounding variable. That's the value of a control group. Who's in the same circumstances as the starting group who would use the individual supplement and making sure you have a large enough sample size of both and all the rest.

So definitely worth mentioning that there anyways, or anyway, we will wrap up there and yeah, I think we talked about it enough, Mike, can you let the listeners know where they can find more of your work?

[00:53:14] Mike Fave: Sure thing. They can find me on my website, MikeFave. com, and on my website there, if you're interested, I have a nutrition blueprint available, which will walk you through dietary setup, and a way to, the dietary setup will be the most foundational component to get the hormones under control, and then you can take the specific steps after that.

[00:53:32] Jay Feldman: Perfect. All right. If you guys enjoyed today's episode, please leave a like or comment. If you're watching on YouTube, and if you're listening elsewhere, please leave a five star rating and a review of those things really do a lot to help support the podcast and are very much appreciated as always to check out the show notes for today's episode, where we'll link the studies articles and anything else that we referenced.

Head over to jfeldmanwellness. com. And as we discussed today, there's a lot of conflicting information out there when it comes to creating a diet to help rebalance your hormones, maximize your energy. And this is something that Wendy talks about as well. We didn't dig into as much, but. In any case, this is the reason why I created the energy balance food guide.

The energy balance food guide helps you determine exactly what to eat to optimally support your metabolism, help you lose weight, improve your digestion, get amazing sleep, boost your energy and rebalance your hormones. The energy balance food guide is one page infographic that organizes foods on a spectrum based on how effectively they support your metabolism.

And it also has a separate spectrum that adjusts the scale for you in the case that you're dealing with various digestive symptoms. The food guide makes it extremely easy to get started with a bioenergetic approach to optimizing your health. So head over to jfeldmanwellness. com slash guide to download your free energy balance food guide.

And with that, we'll see you on the next episode.