The Concern about Estrogen Mimickers

Estrogen has been identified as a carcinogen, which sounds pretty scary to women who know they produce lots of estrogen in the bodies.

Like so many other things, it is all about amounts and ratios.  In the right amounts and ratios, estrogen and other hormones are therapeutic.  In the wrong amounts or ratios, they create health problems. Women (and men) need estrogen for proper functioning and hormone balance and a healthy body has the ability to create the right amounts and ratios. Our livers are also designed to breakdown and eliminate excess estrogens.  We even have three different types of estrogens with different strengths to help offset the very powerful type.

So what is all the hype and concern about estrogen dominance?   Is it a legitimate concern worthy of our understanding and then addressing?

I believe there are 2 major concerns that potentiate each other.

1. One has to do with the unprecedented amount of toxicity in our environments and foods  (and water) that has our bodies – especially our livers, working way too hard to get them broken down and excreted from our bodies.  There are many serious repercussion of this with one of them being that the liver may not be doing an effective job breaking down and eliminating excess estrogen.  You can actually get a urine test to see how well your liver is breaking down estrogen

2. The second concern is that there are so many estrogen mimickers that get into our bodies. These are chemically similar enough to estrogen that the estrogen receptors sites all over our bodies uptake these chemicals and respond to them as if they were estrogen.  These strong estrogen mimickers not only throw off hormone balance but they encourage rapid cell division, which can drive the growth of any estrogen sensitive cancers. The most commons ones are certain types of breast and prostate cancers but it is not limited to these.  One of the balances Mother Nature has created to offset even the normal presence of estrogen is having enough progesterone in the body.  There is a normal healthy ratio we seek between estrogen and progesterone. Yet another problem with estrogen mimickers is that when your body now senses that it has plenty of estrogen, it stops producing follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone (LH). FSH and LH normally stimulate the ovaries to produce both estrogen and progesterone. Now your body is full of estrogen. But your progesterone levels can sink to nothing.

Here are just some of the products containing estrogen mimickers. As a guideline, most name brand products have them. That is why you want to seek healthy alternatives that actually have the wellbeing of their customers in mind.  And this list is not including the hormone-laced dairy, poultry and beef products that virtually all factory-farmed animals produce.

Estrogen Mimicking Products 

• vinyl flooring

• detergents
• dryer sheets

• shampoo

• deodorants
• perfumes
• hair spray
• moisturizers
• garden hoses

• inflatable and plastic toys

• pesticides

• fertilizers

• plastics (as in water bottles and other plastic food containers)

Protective Pro-active Measures You can take… 

Minimizing your exposure to all of the above is a powerful anti-cancer intervention.  In addition, eating healthy phytonutrients that are weak estrogens can help fill the estrogen receptor sites with a far weaker estrogen than those created by the toxic estrogen mimickers.  And it appears much safer to let your body extract the phytoestrogens from whole foods rather than taking a man-made isolated extract.

Phytoestrogen foods include:

• Edible seeds (and seed oils) like sesame, sunflower, pumpkin, amaranth,

• Most beans and peas (of using soybeans – must be organic and ideally fermented)

• Leafy greens such as parsley, nettle, kelp, cabbage, broccoli, kale, collards

• Seaweed

• Many fruits (olives, cherries, grapes, apples, pears, peaches, plums, berries, salmon berries, apricots, crab apples, quinces, rosehips,)

• Olive oil

• Garlic, onions and their relatives: leeks, chives, scallions, ramps, shallot

• Curcumin

You may also have heard about herbs that are used for estrogen replacement after menopause.  These are more powerful phytoestrogen sources and should be used discerningly and with the guidance of a healthcare professional. They typically should not be used in combination. Herbal medicine is natural but also powerful enough to require professional guidance to avoid toxicity or imbalances.

Some examples of powerful phytoestrogen herbs include: black cohosh root, black currant, black haw, dong quai root, devil’s club root, ginseng root, groundsel herb, licorice, motherwort herb, peony root, raspberry leaves, rose family plants (most parts), sage leaves, sarsaparilla root, saw palmetto berried, wild yam root, yarrow blossoms.