hol+ by Dr. Taz MD

[00:00:00] In clinic. In practice, we are diagnosing every single day, more and more cases of things like P-C-O-S-M-C-A-S, mast Cell Activation syndrome, pots endometriosis, not to mention the epidemic of anxiety, depression, eating disorders, A DD and A DHD. I could go on high Cortis. Low progesterone, even lower testosterone levels is starting to become the norm.

And the conversation that's not happening is that we can actually control our hormones and get them to a place that they work for us rather than against us. Welcome to Whole Plus, the podcast that embraces and tackles the holistic way, bringing it all together. Science, research, innovations and technology, and our collective human experience.

This is where science and spirit come together. I'm Dr. Taz, your host and a double board certified medical doctor and integrative health expert, a nutritionist and an acupuncturist. I'm also the founder and CEO of whole Plus. A digital and clinical platform where my team [00:01:00] and I practice evidence-based holistic medicine every single day.

I know and I hear all the health and wellness noise that's out there. I want this show to be the one to empower you with the knowledge you need to heal. Not just your body, but your relationships, your communities, and our world. Welcome to Whole Plus. Many of you have heard me tell this story where my entire health crashed at the age of 28, and behind that crash was a crash in my hormone levels.

I was feeling exhausted, burned out, not really knowing what was going on with my body. And I've heard that same story from so many of you. In this next episode of Whole Plus, we are going to talk about hormones and how they are important at every single age. And it's not just a conversation for perimenopause and menopause.

Get ready to learn more about your hormones and how to have hormonal control, how to test your hormones, and what we should all be thinking about through every single decade. We are in the midst of a hormonal [00:02:00] crisis. I've talked about this before and I've written about it in my latest book, the Hormone Shift, but I really wanna take some time today to peel away the layers behind this so that we all understand that hormones are a vital sign.

There is superpower for all of us, and it's not just a conversation for 40 and 50. Those decades are just when maybe the alarm bells really go off and we can no longer ignore them. But the seeds of our health, the seeds of our hormone health are planted way earlier. In fact, in recent research and studies, there's some conversation around the fact that some of this may actually begin in utero with your mother's health and your father's health.

Now that seems super overwhelming, right? And something that we can't control. So we're not gonna park there. But we do need to be thinking about the things that influence our hormones before we even know about hormones. What am I talking about? [00:03:00] Well, if you're a mom or a dad or you're taking care of children, this is for you, your child's gut health.

Their liver health, their exposure to environmental toxins is all influencing what ultimately is going to happen with their hormones, which usually show up at least obviously, around puberty. Here's how it's all connected. What we know now in research is something that has been talked about in Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine for centuries, thousands of years, that within the gut there is the sea of bacteria and organisms, and enzymes all communicating, all working together to make our hormones work for us.

Now in Chinese medicine, they talked about this in different ways, right? They talked about the spleen meridian, or they talked about a child with weak QI or low kidney meridian energy. In Ayurveda, they talked about prana or your life force, and [00:04:00] if you were not born with sufficient life force, well then they could be predictive, honestly, about the fact that you would have hormone instability as the years went by.

But if we now look at research and science, and this is where it all comes together, and this is the fun part of what I do. Quite honestly, when we look at the research and the science that is rapidly evolving and new studies coming out every single day, here's what we find. We understand that certain gut bacteria are directly responsible for how your hormones are metabolized, packaged, and then ultimately removed from your body.

And when things work well, when things are in symphony and in harmony, here's how it's supposed to go. You eat healthy food, you break down healthy food, you absorb the nutrients from that food, those nutrients feed all those gut bacteria that we just talked about. And those gut bacteria, they take the toxins, they take [00:05:00] hormone metabolites that you're getting in from the environment or from even the foods that we're eating.

They package them up and they dump them back out and they keep what you need. Yeah, that's in a perfect world and in that perfect world, children are healthy, they have good gut habits, they have good mental health, they have energy, they have vitality. They have Q and prana and all these different words that we use to describe it.

And as they hit their pubertal years, their teenage years, right? And that can span from anywhere around 11, all the way up to 16, depending on the teenager and depending on their family history. The hormones start to show up, but they're not coming in with dramatic entry and having all these different issues for our young teens and for adolescents in terms of their health.

Sure, there's a mood swing here or there maybe some new acne that we all become aware of. Maybe there's some body odor. I have a son, so I know what that's like. Sorry, cubby, but [00:06:00] it's not to the point where it's taking over the family or taking over the child. Right. But what's happening in today's world is that hormones are creating havoc at a level that is disrupting families and making it difficult to care for our children.

So let me go back to the research. What we're finding in the research is essentially as the gut microbiome changes. As it shifts because of the poor food quality that we all are getting exposed to now, the lower nutrient load that so many of us now consume with processed foods and fast foods and the standard American diet, the stress that even our young children are under and also absorbing our stress and environmental toxins are wearing down the gut, wearing down the liver so that when the hormones do show up.

They're creating hormone toxicity and hormone toxicity is [00:07:00] causing mental health disorders. Everything from anxiety to depression, OCD, even early onset of schizophrenia and so many other neuro immunological conditions that we see in practice today. I'm talking about Pandas Pans, MCAS. Many of these sort of alphabet acronym syndromes that children are having to deal with, teens are having to deal with that we don't have answers for.

And at the root of many of these things are the shifts in hormones. In the hormone shift. I wrote about this teen phase as the rockstar shift, right? Teens were out there, you know, they're rebelling, they're doing what they want. They are on a high one day, they're on a low the other day, and we're just there for the rollercoaster, really not knowing if we're going to land and where we're gonna land when we do so, and that is typical of teenage years.

Here's what's not typical and why we have to have a conversation about teen hormonal health. Now and why you as a mom or dad or parent or caretaker [00:08:00] have to understand this concept? Okay, because that gut microbiome has now shifted all throughout childhood, teens today experience hormone imbalances earlier than they did even a generation ago.

I'm talking about the physiological hormone patterns like estrogen dominance, androgen dominance, low testosterone, high cortisol, and high insulin. This hormone soup was once reserved for those of us in our thirties, forties, or fifties, right? We didn't really think we needed to have this conversation when it came to the health of our teens, but because that microbiome has shifted and because the nutrient load has shifted, and children today are exposed to more toxins than ever before, our teens are now suffering.

In clinic. In practice, we are diagnosing every single day, more and more cases of things like P-C-O-S-M-C-A-S, mast cell activation [00:09:00] syndrome, pots endometriosis, not to mention the epidemic of anxiety, depression, eating disorders, A DD and A-D-H-D-I could go on and if we unwind all of those different disorders that we are seeing in our exam rooms and that are disrupting family homes.

The gut and hormones are at the root of it. One of the things we know for sure is that with hormone shifts, cortisol levels are impacted. So a child or a teenager's resilience to stress goes down. As these hormones continue to play out, and you start to see these symptoms that we talk about of estrogen dominance, which is everything from incredibly painful periods, heavy periods, mood disorders associated with these fluctuating hormone levels, and in our boys, low energy, weight gain, poor muscle mass, hypotonia, low tone.

These are all things that we see in our boys, and as these continue to play out, the answer [00:10:00] typically is once you and your child go to your regular doctor, is. To take the birth control pill, but let's talk about the birth control pill for just a second. We have now the research that is showing that bandaid solution, which takes care of the hormone shifts, is causing sometimes more harm than good.

And here's how studies since 2004 have shown that birth control pills are connected to higher levels of inflammation. We can measure this in practice with a high CRP. Studies have also shown that birth control pills can contribute to anxiety and depression, and there's actually chemistry behind it.

Birth control pills have been tied to the fact that when cortisol levels go up, they have trouble coming back down. Let's take two teenagers or young adults, 19, 20 17. You name the age. If you have one on a birth control pill and one not on a birth [00:11:00] control pill, and you expose them both to the same amount of stress.

The one on the birth control pill has a poor stress response because their ability to control cortisol, the stress hormone is impaired because of the pill. In addition to that, they have a setup for more inflammation in the body versus the one that didn't go on it. Now, look, I'm a mom of two teenagers.

If they need birth control, they need birth control. You know what I mean? Like we don't wanna go down that road, you know the road I'm talking about. So I'm not here to say we do nothing. What I am here to say is that when we're talking about hormone shifts and when we're talking about managing hormones.

We need a plan, and that plan has to be a supportive plan that supports gut health. Liver health really pays attention to the nutrient and toxic load so that our teenagers can handle the fluctuations in hormones and the storage of hormones in a much better way. Essentially, we're setting them up for success.[00:12:00]

Now I started this episode saying the hormone shift conversation is not limited to over 40 and over 50. And I've spent a little bit of time right now just talking about our teenagers. In fact, as I'm talking, I'm thinking we should have done just a whole episode on teenagers. 'cause there's so much research and there's so much science behind what's happening with teenage hormones.

But if we want to set our teenagers up for success when it comes to their hormone health, and we wanna see a decline in conditions like PCOS endometriosis, even low testosterone in our boys, well, the starting point is to start with the gut. Balance the microbiome under understand their toxic load and measure their hormones.

I'm so tired of people saying that we don't need to measure hormones. You need to know what you're dealing with so that you can have a targeted and focused plan. But let's move on from our teenagers and move into the roaring twenties, is what I like to call them. The hustler shift where everyone is, you know, grinding, staying up [00:13:00] late, waking up early, trying to prove themselves in all kinds of different scenarios, whether it's in college, the workplace, they're starting to date, they're starting to have relationships, maybe experimenting, who knows.

But in that era of the twenties. When cortisol now is truly being taxed because of their lifestyle. Many young people in their twenties are drinking a lot. They're eating a lot of fast food. They're not paying attention. Now, I've got a credit social media and TikTok today with at least some of these young men and women in their twenties starting to ask these questions, right?

They're asking, where's my gut health? Where's my liver health? You know, am I in a good place for fertility in my early, you know, in my late twenties and early thirties? So I love that. Some people are having this conversation, but I still think we're behind because in this hustler area, as cortisol becomes the dominant hormone, if you've got the spike in cortisol layered on top of a poor childhood gut microbiome and estrogen dominance, or low [00:14:00] progesterone, or low testosterone, or already high cortisol from your teenage years, your twenties can be a time where illness truly develops.

And this is where we see anxiety that has to be medicated, or depression that can be incredibly severe. Or we see our young adults truly suffer from an energy crisis, a mental health crisis, or just feeling like they're having these out-of-body experiences. So as we go into our twenties, high cortisol, low progesterone, even lower testosterone levels is starting to become the norm.

And many people in their twenties are simply too busy to pay attention to it. They may get a symptom here and a symptom there. The occasional trouble sleeping, having heart palpitations, not having energy, not being able to focus, you name it. All of those are truly tied to hormones and hormone fluctuations, but they typically ignore it.[00:15:00]

And maybe exist on a cocktail of different pharmaceuticals, whether that's Adderall or Vyvanse, a birth control pill, and maybe something else for anxiety. It seems to be the current cocktail of today when it comes to managing your twenties. But what I'm here to say to anybody listening who is in their twenties, please get to the root of why you're on these different medications.

Oftentimes, it's again, that interface between what your hormones are doing, what your digestive tract is doing, and how we need to intervene to either block some of these hormones or support the others. Let's do a hormone loop for just a minute, and this applies across the decades, by the way, and it isn't really just limited to a particular age group.

For many people, depending on certain genetics, as cortisol goes up, insulin goes up. As those two hormones rise, androgen levels go up. What's an androgen? Well, these are the bad guys really. When it comes to testosterone, it's high [00:16:00] DHEA. It's high free testosterone. It's high DHT, and what that means for you is more acne, more hair loss, more mood swings, and here's the kicker, A lot more rage and all of that gets missed in the exam room.

You get Accutane, maybe something for your hair and definitely something for your mood. I know that that was my journey going into my twenties and into my late twenties when I was diagnosed with PCOS, and this is why we think we're seeing so much PCOS today. But that androgen pattern is not just limited to PCOS.

It also presents in endometriosis and in many other conditions as well. Now, let's take this 20-year-old who has lived this hustler life and let's move them into their later twenties and into their maybe early thirties. This is the building here. Right now, we're thinking about building a career. We were experimenting at first, but now we're actually in this phase of trying to understand what is next for us in terms of [00:17:00] family and career stability and so much more.

We're putting roots down, so to speak. But so many women today simply cannot get pregnant. And I see this over and over again and a lot of women blame themselves. And while there's a story with female hormones, there's also a story with male hormones too. Okay. And as I talked about in the hormone shift, which really breaks all of this down and takes this holistic approach to hormone balancing that fertility conversation, the sort of sacred time for women when they should be birthing and producing is turning into a nightmare because women are showing up in men in this phase of their life with low energy depleted, high cortisol, high insulin, and oftentimes high androgens.

The answer that I'm hearing over and over again, well freeze your eggs. Freeze your eggs. Do IVF, do IUI? All the procedural ways of trying to get pregnant, which I [00:18:00] equate to something like birth control, which was band-aiding a hormone symptom to begin with. And while those things work and do give hope and promise to so many young women and so many families.

We're still not talking about hormones, and we're still not talking about hormone shifts that are blocking the ability of women today to get pregnant and blocking the ability of men to participate in that process. As we move into our thirties and we want to really create a warrior womb, so to speak, understanding what your hormones are doing, what your gut is doing, where liver health and stress and cortisol play into the fertility conversation too.

So this hormone shift is critical, but if we detour and don't take the time to jump into that conversation and instead bandaid it with IVF and many of the procedures that I just talked about, we again walk out of those years with this heavy hormone [00:19:00] load and hormone metabolites that the body is storing in different tissues.

You can store it in your breast, you can store it in your uterus, you can store it in your muscles, your bones, and so many other places. And here's the kicker. You can even store these metabolites in your brain. We're understanding more and more about what we're calling hippocampal hormones. Those are hormones that actually live in the brain.

Cortisol is one of them. But the influence of our female and male sex hormones, estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, for example, influence what our hippocampal hormones are doing. And that's the interplay again, between our mental health and how we feel and how we think and how we walk through the day, and our physiology and biochemistry, and what our hormones are actually doing.

So women move on, families move on. Families are busy, right? You have young kids. There's a lot going on. You don't have time to dig in and think about your health until you have to, and that have to comes into the stage or [00:20:00] comes into the picture with a roar. Sometimes it's a diagnosis. This is a vulnerable age and stage for women and men as they transition from their thirties into their forties.

You can transition seamlessly and beautifully, or it can be filled with symptoms and confusion and diagnoses. A recent study talked about the fact that 44 was the critical age when health turns for adults, especially adults in America. I would say back to that study, it's been turning and it's been turning much earlier, and if you're gonna wait till 44, that's too late.

I love that we're talking about perimenopause and menopause today. I think that's incredible. I think that we're advocating for women at every age, right? Talking about how their hormones are playing into their daily lives. We've seen women talk about how their periods make them debilitated. We've seen athletes skip events because they were on their period, and we are now seeing the evolution of menopause, workplace rights, and so [00:21:00] many other movements.

Honestly, to recognize the importance of female hormones. But what we're not doing and the conversation that's not happening is that we can actually control our hormones and get them to a place that they work for us rather than against us. I still see a lot of external stuff going on. Right, but what about the internal.

What about understanding as you're moving and now from your thirties in that fertility stage of your life into your late thirties and early forties? What about understanding what hormone metabolites are looking like in you? And if they're now influencing not just cortisol that we've been talking about for all the other years, but now influencing insulin levels and you're starting to gain weight, having issues with metabolic markers like your lipids, your blood pressure, and so much more.

They're continuing to impact your mental health and you're not showing up like yourself in your families or your communities or your workplace. Now you get the [00:22:00] label of perimenopause, right? Is that comforting? Maybe now you know that there's a hormone shift, low progesterone, declining, estrogen right behind it, rising cortisol, rising insulin, all building upon what we started this conversation with.

Your childhood gut microbiome, your teenage hormones, how you lived your twenties, how you lived your thirties, and now we're suddenly at 40. The forties can be an amazing decade. You feel strong. You feel powerful. You're sure of yourself. You've built that family, or you're still building it. You feel strong in your career.

You know what's next for you, but they can be equally frustrating and full of heartache. Where you don't feel good, and when we don't feel good, we don't do good and we can't show up for everybody in our lives to our fullest capacity and ability. So the shift into perimenopause should be planned way before we call it [00:23:00] perimenopause.

I feel personally so grateful and for. That I had my hormone crash in my twenties because it forced me to dig in, dive deep and understand my gut health, my nutrition, my genetics, what works for me, and what I could and could not do. I've told this story so many times. I thought being fat free was the way to go.

I thought diet Coke and popcorn was healthy until it wasn't, and until I had to take the time out to understand what worked for me. And for those of you who come into our practice, you are just like that old me. You think certain things are healthy and you're doing them right, but at the end of the day, it's not really right for you.

So as you move into perimenopause and then menopause, which of course so many people are talking about today, and I think that's fabulous. But even with menopause, if we're not connecting the dots between gut health, liver health, environmental toxicity, stress, and [00:24:00] sleep, then we're not doing the conversation around hormones, any justice.

Moving into the forties with perimenopause and then moving into the fifties with menopause. And I talk about all these hormone shifts by decade. By the way, in my latest book, the Hormone Shift, which by the way, is now available in Paper Vac, so you can carry it around. And I really break it down in terms of what you need to be thinking about at each and every one of these stages and incorporate many of the herbal and natural remedies that help to support hormones through these different decades.

But by the time you get to late perimenopause and menopause, oftentimes we need hormone support, and that's just the reality of the situation. Some women can glide through it without issues, but as estrogen and progesterone and testosterone all go down, and for men, if you're listening, when testosterone goes down, it profoundly changes.

Some of our basic health determinants, like our metabolic markers, again, our mental health, our bone health, our energy, our vitality, our sleep, you know, [00:25:00] the ability to build muscle. We can all go on. So when we're hitting menopause and we're thinking about hormones and actually replacing hormones with hormones, we again have to deploy this holistic approach.

Because I see a lot of blessing around HRT and hormone replacement therapy. But again, just 'cause it's hormone replacement therapy does not always mean it's going to work for you. Many of the synthetic hormones in birth control pills in our IUDs now in our HRT have compounds that trigger inflammation in the body.

So it's important for you to know where you are with inflammation, with your ability to detox with your genetics, certain genetics make you hold onto hormones versus others, and really get that full picture in that full story. So again, I share this with you to not overwhelm you by any means, but more to say that [00:26:00] the hormone story is not a singular, standalone story.

It has to have a holistic approach and it has to be interconnected and sort of woven into the fabric of your overall health. And it's not that you take a hormone here at any age, whether it's a birth control pill or whether it's IVF or whether it's HRT, and that you're gonna be okay 'cause the symptom was fixed or the condition was fixed instead, anything that you do has consequences on another pathway in your body.

So if you're not understanding whether again, you're 13 or 17, or 25 or 38, I'm making these ages up. It doesn't matter. The point of this entire episode is that it does not matter, the ages irrelevant, but the importance of understanding where these hormones are landing is what ultimately is critical and vital for your health.

Understanding cortisol because it impacts your [00:27:00] mental health, understanding progesterone 'cause it impacts cortisol, understanding estrogen 'cause it impacts everything. Understanding testosterone, thyroid, insulin, all of them are going to make a difference with how you show up in the world and what you do for your community, for your families, for your children, and for your workplace.

So hormone shifts happen from the beginning. They probably are happening even at conception, but we can control so much for our children, for our own personal health by diving into a holistic approach. There's so many different ways to test. It doesn't have to be painful. It does not have to be expensive.

That is the biggest fallacy that I've heard over and over again. You can do conventional testing for everything that I have just rattled off today. If you wanna take it a step further, you can pair conventional testing with things like saliva or urine testing that look a little [00:28:00] bit more at tissue levels of hormones versus circulating blood levels.

And there is a discrepancy there, and that's why as we get older, tools like thermography are helpful or ultrasound or imaging to understand what your actual hormone sensitive tissues are doing. And this is a conversation not just for women, it's for men too, to understand how hormones are impacting their overall health.

Because as testosterone changes, cortisol goes up, insulin goes up, the thyroid gets impacted. Their lipid markers play into it. I could go on. So as we dig into the conversations around hormones and hormone shifts, it's so important for each and every one of us, for all of you to understand that your hormones are a vital sign.

They are driving many other aspects of your health. In your loved one's health and that hormones are influenced by many other determinants of your body, and that's why the holistic way is the only way to talk about [00:29:00] hormones. If you'd like to dive deeper into this conversation around hormones and hormone shifts, my latest book, the Hormone Shift, is now available in paperback.

I'm so excited about this. We've sold over 30,000 copies, and it's available everywhere the books are sold, and in it you'll really understand sort of the nuts and bolts of a holistic approach to hormone balancing. Check it out. Share it with everyone you know, we've got to change the conversation around hormones.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Whole Plus, be sure to share this episode with your friends and family. And if you haven't already, please take a moment to subscribe to this podcast on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. To engage with the community, follow at Live Whole Plus and check out our website whole plus.co.

That's HOL ps.co. For more resources and information on holistic health, see you next time.