by Dave Asprey
WHAT’S HURTING OUR HORMONES?
The process of aging itself causes a shift in our hormones, but it’s not the only factor in the hormonal fluctuations that occur with age. Two common culprits of hormone imbalances are a poor diet and exposure to environmental pollutants. In other words, modern living is not kind to our hormones. In fact, American men have seen their average serum testosterone levels decline by about 1 percent each year17 over the past several years.
Here’s how your body makes testosterone: cholesterol→ pregnenolone→ androstenedione→ testosterone.
Testosterone begins with cholesterol. In fact, you synthesize every single sex hormone from cholesterol. This is one reason that a “heart healthy” low-fat, low-cholesterol diet is horribly aging. Research confirms that men who eat saturated fat, monounsaturated fat, and cholesterol have higher testosterone levels than those who follow a low-fat diet.18 (Maybe there really is such a thing as benign vegan-induced testicular atrophy!)
Carbohydrates, on the other hand, deplete your hormones, specifically testosterone. You may find this hard to believe, but some common high-carb foods like cornflakes and graham crackers were invented a century ago to lower the male libido. Kellogg and Graham believed that male sexual desire was at the root of all society’s problems, so they set out to make bland foods that would reduce libido. (This is true; look it up.) That low-fat grain-based thing absolutely works wonders for lowering testosterone, if that’s your goal. It’s certainly not mine.
There are two keys to naturally boosting testosterone through your diet: getting enough fat and getting the right kinds of fat. A study from back in 1984 looked at thirty healthy men who switched from eating 40 percent fat (much of it saturated) to 25 percent fat (much of it unsaturated), with more protein and carbs to make up the difference in calories. After six weeks, their average serum testosterone, free testosterone, and 4-androstenedione (an important hormone for testosterone synthesis) had all dropped significantly.19 By the way, the idea that a low-fat diet was healthy began to catch steam in the mid-1970s, shortly before the nationwide testosterone decline started. It could be a coincidence, but I doubt it.
The other problem with a Western diet is that it’s lacking key micronutrients that we need to create hormones, specifically vitamin D, which is essential for testosterone production. As you read earlier, almost everyone is now deficient in vitamin D because of our overavoidance of UV light. This is likely a major reason behind the decrease in testosterone levels. A study published in 2010 looked at the vitamin D and testosterone levels of more than two thousand men over the course of a full year. The results showed that men with healthy vitamin D levels had more testosterone and lower levels of sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG) than the men who were vitamin D deficient.20 SHBG binds to hormones so your cells can’t use them. If you have too much of it, your testosterone levels will drop.
The other interesting thing about this study is that the men’s testosterone levels were lowest in March (at the end of winter) and highest in August (at the end of summer). Sunlight exposure affects your vitamin D production, and you are meant to have seasonal dips and peaks. Many of our hormones rise and fall in natural cycles. This is one reason hormone replacement therapy is such a tricky business. If you take a pill every day, you won’t experience the natural rhythm of hormone increases and decreases that our bodies are meant to cycle through as we move through time. This is precisely why the Wiley Protocol for both men and women includes carefully created dosing cycles to replicate nature.
I recommend getting a blood test to check your levels of vitamin D, and if you’re deficient, take a high quality vitamin D3 supplement. If you’re going to take D3, take vitamin K2 and vitamin A along with it, since they work together synergistically. While you’re at it, take a look at your zinc levels, as a zinc deficiency can also cause low testosterone. If you’re low on zinc, try eating more grass-fed red meat and/or taking a zinc orotate supplement.
In addition to the impact of the standard Western diet on our hormones, hormone-disrupting chemicals are now more prevalent in our environment than ever before. Many popular deodorants, lotions, shampoos, conditioners, shaving creams, and other grooming products now contain hormone disrupters, chemicals that either mimic the effects of hormones in the body or interfere with the function of your hormones. The worst offenders are phthalates, which, in addition to being a nightmare to pronounce, mimic estrogen and accumulate in your fat cells,21 and parabens. All four common types of parabens—methylparaben, ethylparaben, propylparaben, and butylparaben—are estrogenic, meaning they bind to estrogen receptors and change the way estrogen in your body functions.22
For women specifically, there is another major cause of hormone disruption that has become taboo to talk about, but it would be remiss not to include it here: hormonal birth control. It is a basic human right to be able to use any technology or compound you want to control your biology, and that includes birth control in all its forms. However, some forms are better for your long-term health than others. The sad truth is that birth control pills are aging. They contain synthetic estrogen and progesterone. This diminishes pituitary hormone levels, which regulate many processes throughout the body. The result is not just the suppression of ovarian function, which stops women from getting pregnant, but also a decrease in testosterone production.
Women also need testosterone for sexual desire, to be sensitive to sexual touch, and to reach orgasm. In 2010, German researchers published a study in The Journal of Sexual Medicine that found birth control pills significantly decrease levels of circulating testosterone, which resulted in a diminished interest in and enjoyment of sex.23 A lack of sex may be effective, but it’s not the type of birth control most women mean to sign up for when they take the pill.
Birth control pills and other hormonal contraceptives also contain a significant dose of synthetic estrogen. When your body realizes that this estrogen-like stuff is pumping through your system, your liver responds by sending out a surge of sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG), the protein you read about earlier that snaps up excess sex hormones so they don’t wreak havoc on your body.
The problem is that SHBG has no way of knowing that it’s responding specifically to an excess of estrogen. Once released, it indiscriminately snaps up all the estrogen, testosterone, and dihydrotestosterone (DHT, another important sex hormone) it can hang on to. Your levels of all these sex hormones will drop considerably, but your hormonal contraceptive will deliver a fresh surge of estrogen every day. If you stop using hormonal contraceptives, your SHBG levels will eventually go back down, but studies show that even just six months on hormonal contraceptives can keep your SHBG levels elevated for as long as six months after stopping.24
Look, birth control is obviously a personal choice, but oral contraception can take years off your life. It’s powerful to have all the information. Don’t panic if you’ve been on the pill for years. It’s entirely possible to fix your hormones, get back in balance, and get younger. My own amazing wife is proof of this.
In 2004, right after I got back from the hiking trip in Tibet, I was driving through Arizona with my father when I got a call from a friend in the anti-aging and autism research communities. “Dave, you have to come with me to this conference,” she said. She was at the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine main event, which to me is like the Olympics. I’d always wanted to go to that conference, and since it was being held in Las Vegas, I happened to be close by.
A few hours later, I walked into my friend’s hotel room and met Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, a renowned expert in Lyme disease, and a beautiful Swedish ER physician named Lana. I was still wearing hiking clothes because I’d come straight from New Mexico, and she was wearing hiking clothes because she’d come straight from visiting the Grand Canyon. We decided to go for a hike, and we’ve been together ever since.
When I met Lana, she was rail thin, she always felt cold, and she had been diagnosed as infertile because she suffered from
polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), a hormonal disorder that leads to enlarged ovaries. She was also thirty-seven, so as we became more serious and discussed starting a family, we knew that getting her hormones to a place where she could successfully have children could be a challenge. But we wanted to take on that challenge together.
First, we worked on improving her diet. We removed the soy milk that was acting as an estrogen mimic and the flaxseed meal that was high in inflammatory omega-6 fats, and replaced them with healthy saturated fat from egg yolks, coconut and MCT oil, and grass-fed meat. Then we cleaned up her environment, including her personal care products, and worked on managing her stress.
Within a year, Lana gained fifteen pounds that looked great on her, saw huge improvements in her energy levels, felt physically warmer, and her symptoms of PCOS started to diminish. We went on to have our two kids without any medical interventions. We published the research we used to fix her fertility in our first book, The Better Baby Book, and Lana now uses that same advice in her private practice to help many women struggling with infertility.
Whether or not you choose to have kids, to become Super Human you want your body to be as fertile as possible because our bodies are designed to get out of the way as soon as we can’t reproduce. No matter how old you are, you don’t want your hormones telling your body that you’re past the age of reproduction. A much better signal from your hormones is that you are young enough to have kids and therefore worth taking up room on this planet.
HORMONE HACKS
The good news is that there are many simple ways to hack your hormones besides hormone replacement therapy. Please keep in mind that everything you already read about not dying will also help you balance your hormones. This includes getting good quality sleep, eating the right foods, and avoiding junk light and other environmental toxins. Before you integrate any hacks, I recommend getting an advanced hormone panel from a functional medicine doctor so you can assess your needs.
EXERCISE
Exercise is a simple testosterone booster, and it’s one of the most powerful (not to mention least expensive) anti-aging treatments around. Both men and women experience a sharp increase in testosterone and human growth hormone (HGH) after strength training sessions.25 But high-intensity interval training (HIIT), which involves pushing yourself to your edge with superintense exercise followed by a brief rest, is even more effective at increasing testosterone and HGH levels in both men and women.26 It’s also a great option if you’re short on time or don’t want to spend an hour in the gym for every workout.
In addition to boosting hormone levels, both endurance exercise (such as running or cycling for longer periods of time) and HIIT help lengthen telomeres.27 I prefer HIIT because it’s much more efficient, but both options will help you stay younger, longer.
No matter which type of exercise you choose, make sure to give yourself time to recover in between workouts and to get plenty of sleep. Sleep time, duration, and quality of sleep all affect the release of HGH, cortisol, and the hunger hormone leptin.28 Don’t skimp on sleep while engaging in intense exercise! And if you track your sleep and see that you aren’t getting enough good quality shut-eye, give yourself more time than usual in between workouts to fully recover.
L-TYROSINE
The thyroid is the main energy thermostat of the body, and the hormones it releases control your metabolism and how your body uses energy. Thyroid function often declines as you get older, and with that decline comes a decreased production of thyroid hormones. This is becoming increasingly common in young people as well. In fact, I’ve seen people as young as twenty who were suffering from the symptoms of premature aging because their thyroids weren’t working very well. If your thyroid gland isn’t functioning optimally and is failing to produce adequate thyroid hormone, you will feel sluggish and tired and old. People with low thyroid are also at a much higher risk of developing heart disease, and women with low thyroid are at an increased risk of fertility issues.
If you’re cold all the time and your skin is super dry, I recommend getting a comprehensive thyroid panel from a functional medicine doctor. If those tests show that your thyroid is sluggish or that you have problems converting one type of thyroid hormone into another, an amino acid called L-tyrosine can help upregulate your thyroid function a little bit so you naturally produce more thyroid hormones.
L-tyrosine is also a precursor to dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, three crucial neurotransmitters for focus and mood. Supplementing with it can improve cognitive function while under pressure.29 In fact, the military has experimented with using L-tyrosine to help soldiers in combat. You can get some L-tyrosine in your diet, specifically in pork, lamb, beef, and fish, but supplementing with its purified form drives your body to produce more beneficial neurotransmitters. When you get L-tyrosine from dietary sources, it comes with other amino acids that the body uses for protein synthesis.
I recommend supplementing with 500 to 1,000 mg of L-tyrosine per day on an empty stomach in the morning. If your thyroid is low or even “low normal” and you have symptoms, ask your functional medicine doctor about trying a small amount of bioidentical thyroid hormone. Even borderline low thyroid is associated with atherosclerosis and raises LDL cholesterol,30 while adequate thyroid hormones help you stay energetic and lean as you age.
If none of the above works, or if you want to be extremely proactive in your anti-aging protocol, it may be worth considering hormone replacement therapy (HRT). If you go this route, it’s critical to work with an anti-aging specialist or functional medicine doctor. You can even google to find one who is trained in the Wiley Protocol.
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Bottom Line
Want to age backward? Do these things right now:
•Stop eating sugar, soy, excess omega-6 fats, and refined carbs, and replace these foods with additional healthy saturated fat from grass-fed meat, pastured eggs, and energy fats.
•Exercise intensely one to three times per week to boost testosterone levels. Make sure to recover fully in between sessions. Track your sleep to make sure you are fully recovering!
•Consider taking L-tyrosine, vitamin D3, vitamin K2, vitamin A, and zinc supplements to achieve healthy hormone levels. If possible, get your vitamin D and zinc levels tested first to see if yours are low.
•Go through your toiletries and personal care products and get rid of everything containing phthalates and parabens, which mimic hormones in the body and disrupt your natural hormone function.
•If you can, see a functional medicine or anti-aging doctor for a full hormonal workup. If you are deficient in certain hormones and the above advice does not work, explore bioidentical hormone replacement therapy under the care of a trusted physician.
•If you are over forty and have clear signs of low sex hormones, it’s probably safe and likely beneficial to try 25 to 50 mg of DHEA without a lab test.
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10
YOUR TEETH ARE A WINDOW TO THE NERVOUS SYSTEM
In 2005, after successfully using laser therapy for all sorts of things I didn’t expect, from making my whiplash go away to helping improve my cognitive dysfunction,1 I decided to attend a training course on how to use the laser in even broader applications. As I sat in a small, cramped room surrounded by about twenty dentists, I stared in awe at our trainer’s mouth. He had the most perfect set of straight white teeth I had ever seen. “Why would you drive a Lexus,” he asked us, “if you haven’t invested at least that much on your teeth, which control your whole nervous system?”
Today we have research to demonstrate the effects of lasers on the central nervous system, but at the time clinicians could only observe the effects of lasers on their patients and speculate about the underlying science. The trainer explained that our front four teeth emerge from the neural crest, a temporary group of cells, when we are embryos, and the back molars are directly connected to the brain. So your teeth can impact inflammation in the entire body, particularly the ner
vous system.
That trainer used laser therapy on the gums to reduce inflammation in the trigeminal nerve, the largest cranial nerve, which is located along the jaw. The trigeminal nerve controls motor functions in the face and jaw and sends sensory information to the autonomic nervous system, which controls all the bodily functions that happen without our conscious intervention, such as the beating of your heart and the digestion of food.
The little-known field of neurological dentistry recognizes that even micro misalignments in the jaw can cause the trigeminal nerve to send a threat message to your autonomic nervous system, triggering a fight-or-flight response. If your teeth on one side touch before those on the other or your front teeth hit before the back teeth when you bite down, you may be constantly triggering a fight-or-flight response without even realizing it.
What does this have to do with aging? Everything. Remember, a state of fight or flight is literally a physiological state of stress. We already know that chronic stress shortens your telomeres, one of the Seven Pillars of Aging. It also causes your body to consistently release cortisol, the stress hormone, which is highly inflammatory and has its own profound aging effects.
For one thing, excess cortisol triggers the body to store visceral body fat,2 the internal body fat packed around your abdominal organs. Excess visceral fat is associated with insulin resistance regardless of your weight3 and inhibits adiponectin, a hormone that regulates your levels of body fat. Too little adiponectin causes your body to pack on excess fat, and studies show that adiponectin levels decrease with increased visceral fat.4 Both high visceral fat and low adiponectin levels are key indicators of an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.5 And people with excess visceral fat are more likely to have stiff arteries.6
Last but certainly not least, pockets of visceral fat release inflammatory cytokines. But wait, wasn’t this visceral body fat caused by the inflammatory stress hormone cortisol? Yes. Excess cortisol causes inflammation, leading to excess visceral fat, which triggers an increase in pro-inflammatory cytokines. This is just one of many reasons it’s so important to get your stress response in check to become Super Human. You can meditate and do yoga all day long, but if your bite is still triggering a stress response, you are (and this is the medical term) screwed. Like I was.
