Hormone disruptors
<p>Endocrine Dysfunction Hormone and Endocrine Disruptors
The endocrine systems of people with CFS seem to be out of balance.
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Cortisol and DHEA-S are hormones released by the adrenal glands, and are invariably low in people with CFS. They work together to control how the body responds to stress. Low levels of these hormones can cause fatigue, hypoglycemia, poor brain function, allergic reactions, anxiety, and many other problems associated with this condition.
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Melatonin is a hormone released by the pineal gland. Its primary function is to control sleep patterns. During the day the pineal gland is stimulated by light and communicates to produce chemicals such as serotonin to wake the body up. When light levels fall the pineal gland signals the production of melatonin, preparing the body for sleep. Melatonin production appears to be disturbed in CFS, causing a lack of deep, restful sleep.
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Thyroxin is a hormone excreted by the thyroid gland. Studies consistently reveal an under-active thyroid in many people with CFS.
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Hormone imbalance endocrine disruptors and natural solutions webinar
from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PunH8kdjhJw
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After transcribing this I found the official transcript, which contains slightly different information here http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/natural-health/hormonal-imbalance/
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"Today, I'm going to be covering a lot of different topics but what I will really be focusing on is the root cause of hormone imbalance and it's not like one out of nine people have problems with their hormones, it's 100% of the people out there have problems with the hormones. I mean we have a massive debilitating situation worldwide that is being caused by different types of endocrine disrupting chemicals and some of the things were going to get into today that are altering your hormones in your body and it's causing damage and it's causing all kinds of different other issues and is causing infertility it's causing sterility so what i want to do today is let you know that in order to balance your hormones naturally first you have to understand what's causing the hormones to become imbalanced.
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So I'm going to go over a lot of different things today and hopefully by the end I'm going to give you solutions as to what you need to do so your body's self-healing mechanism can kick in and you can balance your hormones naturally again
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So if you're feeling fatigued, run down, depressed, if you have excessive weight gain most likely it's going to be your hormones because your hormones can be imbalanced naturally by your age, your diet, your lifestyle, harmful chemicals, metals and really one of the big kickers is stress, I mean we live in a society today where everybody gets stressed out all the time so we all need hormonal balance so we can experience good health.
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Now health isn't just the absence of problems, health is a focused mind, healthy habits in your lifestyle, a healthy environment, calm nerves, balanced systems within your body, it means that you are at your best, you're confident you feel good, youre mentally and emotionally and spiritually aligned and that ultimately allows us to create and to be healthy and resist any type of illness or disease that might come our way. So what are hormones basically I'm not going to get into all the technical aspects of hormones and everything doesn't really matter you need to know how to balance your hormones naturally if you want to get into the technicalities of how the hormones work together in unison is that like that that's fine you can do that on your own but in general hormones are just chemical messengers in your body that allow the different systems and glands in your body to communicate with each other properly. and hormones are part of the endocrine system and the endocrine system is composed of your pineal gland or what they call the third eye which gets damaged and calcified by fluoride in the water, your hypothalamus your pituitary your adrenal glands the thyroid the parathyroid the thymus the pancreas and the gastrointestinal tract as well as the ovaries and the testes. One thing people really don't really understand a lot is how important the gastrointestinal tract is at regulating the endocrine system.
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All those glands together make up our endocrine system. Now these glands produce the hormones that regulate growth and development, reproduction, fertility and infertility, weight, that's why we have problems with obesity, regulate your moods and the list goes on and on, I mean many other things. Now men and women have the same hormones just in different ratios, women obviously have more estrogen and less testosterone and vice versa and of course we all have adrenal hormones, thyroid hormones and so on. When your hormones are balanced your body is humming along just perfectly, you should feel good you should feel full of energy, but when they're not you have problems and that's what affects your whole body systems your mood and everything else.
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So hormone imbalances literally forwomen basically means that estrogen and progesterone are out of balance and most likely it's going to be high estrogen and not enough progesterone and that's pretty well known as estrogen dominance. For men they're full of testosterone, but their testosterone their DHEA levels their growth hormone levels as they age they start to decline and there's a term for that called andropause and one of the reasons now is that men as well as women are taking in too much estrogen, and they can experience the same symptoms as women can and many other symptoms including sterility with estrogen dominance.
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So we are seeing right now in the current times and it's been getting worse and worse and worse over the years, a estrogen dominance that doesn't happen naturally. It happens as a result of industrial polutants and chemicals and a lot of the stuff that you have around your house probably that you don't even realize that's coming into your body. Now there's a ton of environmental toxins that can also really amplify estrogen dominance anyway. So you know a lot of people don't know that they have hormonal issues by we could list about 100 200 different symptoms for just this webinar today and I'llk just go through a few of them, number one skin problems, if you have acne you have blotchyness in your skin, premature wrinkling that would be assigned a hormone deficiency or imbalance if you have hair loss, you know I talk to a lot of women all the time and every time especially women with long hair and every time they take a shower they have clumps of hair coming out, that's a telltale sign that your hormones are imbalanced or unwanted hair growth either way where you can have unwanted hair somewhere else. Another thing obviously is weight gain especially around the belly area the thighs the buttocks is the big problem and the sad thing about all this is it's affecting our children now just as much as the adults, girls are going through puberty at younger ages and men are becoming feminine because of the estrogen and so that's also a big issue but another big symptom is lack of energy also diminished libido sex drive sleep disturbances especially if you're having hot flashes night sweats these can lead to insomnia, memory problems people on so many stimulus on psychotropic drugs that affect their sleep cycle so it's really something to look at if you're having problems with your sleep because if you're having problems sleeping most likely you're not going to be in the best mood every single day so, and hormones and mental health are very closely related I mean we got an antidepressant epidemic and not only in this country but especially throughout Europe we have so many antidepressants in the water system that even in some countries drinking a gallon of water is the equivalent of you taking one pill of an antidepressant, so the problem is most doctors believe that women and men are depressed and they need antidepressants but it's the completely wrong approach. Nine times out of 10 it's not depression it's something wrong with the hormones and again standard medic medicine doesn't address the root cause of the problem they just address the symptoms of the problem and put a Band-Aid over it so it's really not depression is just a hormone imbalance or chemical imbalance inside your system. most people that we've worked with most people that just clean their body on a regular basis they balance their hormones and then the anxiety and the mood swings the depression and the mental cloudiness and the brain fog and everything just mysteriously go away but it doesn't mysteriously go away it's the fact that you're actually doing something to balance out your hormones.
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So one of the things that we have a really big problem with today and this subject of hormones really comes close to my heart because spending years and years tracking down these endocrine disruptors basically and what we're going to start off with is talk about endocrine disruptors and what endocrine disruptors are are chemicals, most of the man-made, but some of them can occur naturally, that interfere with hormones and endocrine disruptors can reduce the production of hormones by the endocrine glands they can influence when, how much and if the endocrine glands release hormones they can affect the organ or the tissue that the hormones are trying to communicate with they might speed up the metabolism of hormones may reduce the action. One thing though that's really bad is that they can block or mimic the hormones and that's especially estrogen, so endocrine disrupting chemicals or EDC's as most people call them are hugely disruptive to the endocrine system. Now you know the reason I'm saying this is because these are the things that you want to look for to avoid, it's all about cleaning up your environment and avoiding hormone disrupting chemicals that allows your body to balance the hormones naturally again.
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I'm not a proponent for hormone replacement therapy a hundred percent of the time or anything like that, but what I am a proponent of that's worked millions and millions of times is teaching people how to clean their environment and how to balance their hormones naturally. so hormones operate at very tiny amounts and they can be disturbing even by low low doses of hormonally active chemicals. So not only are endocrine disrupting chemicals bad for you but they're also bad for the environment it's been proven that they harm wildlife reproduction, I mean we have a serious problem with not only us but the animals because these chemicals are getting in all the waters the animals that you know, the pesticides and herbicides that these animals are exposed to or toxic food that they're eating the same thing is happening to the animals they cause these chemicals cause reproductive disorders in humans they cause infertility in males and females they're linked to a host of cancers and now we know without a doubt that exposure to these endocrine disrupting chemicals during early development in the womb and during childhood may cause permanent effects and might even cause permanent effects for generation after generation after generation.
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Unfortunately many of the most used industrial, most of the industrial chemicals are endocrine disruptors and the sad thing is that there is very poor regulations and absolutely horrible oversight by the organization the government that is supposed to be protecting us the EPA the FDA the USDA not to mention the iresponsibility of corporate these corporate Monsanto in these big Dow Agro sciences and Cingenta and all these corporations that are putting out the majority of these chemicals and the plasticizers and everything else that are being released into the atmosphere and that have made their way into the food in the water. So again I want to talk to you about some of the most common things that you can avoid some of the most common endocrine disruptors out there it's going to be things that BPA dioxins and atrazine phthalates perchlorate fire retardants lead mercury arsenic organophosphate pesticides glycol esters, just some of these different things that you don't have to understand the actual chemicals but what you do need to do is understand that where these chemicals are coming from and how to find them and how to look for them in your own environment. Again it's just about keeping your own environment clean.
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Some of these are actually called xeno estrogens and xeno estrogen is actually a type of xeno hormone and it really what it means is just that it's a chemical compound that imitates estrogen, basically like a fake estrogen and these can be synthetic or natural compounds.
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So starting with one of the most significant xeno estrogens that is out there that I highly recommend that you avoid is going to be bisphenol A, or BPA and that's a chemical used in plastics. In your body it imitates estrogen, now think about how much plastic you're around every day and how food, just about every container is in plastic. The evidence of BPA toxicity is overwhelming and basically what happens is your body identifies BPA as if it was real estrogen and this can lead to your body behaving like it's loaded with estrogen.
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So BPA has been been known to affect fertility, breast health, cause reproductive cancers initiate obesity diabetes and even early pregnancy. Now we've made a little bit of progress reducing the use of BPA but it was mostly a cover-up and most people don't know this, there's such a big market in BPA that the big companies when the baby bottle scandal came out with BPA, they were like 'okay let's just take BPA out of baby bottles', well they did that just so they could create a diversion so most people would say 'okay well these BPA is out of everything'. Well, the whole activist community pretty much stopped addressing the dangers of BPA after the baby bottle, because everybody just assumed it was gone and that's not the case, I means the BPA is still found in most food packaging sources. Back in 2008 Canada band baby bottles that contain BPA and at the time Walmart even volunteered to pull them off the shelf in the USA despite assurances from the FDA that the bottles were safe, again the FDA said that that BPA was safe, and it wasn't until 2010 where the FDA finally admitted that the national toxicology program studies were correct and that BPA was damaging to the brain, caused behavioral issues in children and affected the prostate gland, also affected fetuses and children. In 2011 the Harvard school of medicine published a study in the journal Pediatrics that found pregnant mothers exposure to BPA correlated behaviors of hyperactivity anxiety aggression and depression. I think that all of these childhood disorders that we're having problems with these days are all caused by chemicals. I'm a hundred percent sure of it because I know, but the problem is nobody else knows out there, but this is a Harvard school study right here I mean is telling you that. University of Virginia school of Medicine, when they exposed female mice to low levels of BPA before and during pregnancy, the offspring experienced measurable behavioral and neuronal changes. The genetic changes were detectable in the second third and even the fourth generation like I was saying earlier, it doesn't affect you now it can affect you four generations from now, can you imagine what happens four generations from now because of all these endocrine disrupting chemicals?
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That was published in the Journal of Endocrinology, it's not like I'm making thius stuff up, this is scientific evidence. 90% of us have detectable amounts of BPA in our urine on any given day. BPA is actually even found on receipts and money right now so if you touch any receipt you're most likely getting BPA, if you're touching money you're getting BPA and one of the things that people don't understand, how many people out there use the microwave oven, you know how many TV dinners and food packaging is packaged in plastics out there, you heat it in the microwave not only BPA but all the chemicals end up coming in to your food. So I'll tell you another thing how many people do you know the drink out of aluminum cans diet drinks beer out of aluminum cans canned food that's in your pantry canned peas carrots, whatever even if it's organic. One that I'm really upset about is the national organic program hasn't eliminated BPA from the cartons, a lot of the linings in milk cartons, coconut milk, almond milk is not organic and you anything anything that is not organic is going to have BPA lining inside the cans the metal cans, so how do you avoid BPA? First thing you want to do is avoid canned food, and you should be eating healthy live food anyway, almost all cans, milk containers, all that stuff especially if it's not organic is going to be BPA lined.
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Plastics with the recycling labels number one, number two and number four when you look on the bottom it has that little triangle with a number on it, those are the safer choice and do not contain BPA. Plastics marked with a PC for polycarbonate or a recycling number seven, be careful of those. Even a lot of the bottled water you have these days still have BPA or some other toxic plastic that sits out in the sun a lot of times at the convenience store or during shipping it can contain high levels that BPA.
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next way to avoid BPA is going to be to not microwave your food or store food in plastic containers it will leech right into your food. Try not to handle, like I said earlier paper cash receipts, money, stuff like that, avoid drinking beer sodas, all that stuff in aluminum cans, if you're going to drink sodas, which you shouldn't be doing anyways because the body only wants and needs water after breast-feeding, then at least go to an organic food store and get your sodas or whatever in glass bottles and avoid any of the aluminum cans. Avoid cheap plastic toys, a lot of the swim toys, pretty much all the plastic toys that come from China are going to have toxic plastics and chemicals and that can be dangerous to your health and your child's health, so avoid plastic toys, one other cooking utensils you should use silicone or bamboo or something like that you just try to go all glass bamboo or silicon.
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The second xenoestrogen that I want to talk about is dioxins and dioxins are industrial chemicals that interfere with the male and female sex hormones. Dioxins really affects sperm quality and counts and even worse dioxins build up in the body and over time they damage the immune system and the reproductive systems. According to the World Health Organization, about 95% of human exposure to dioxins comes from the diet and the highest level of dioxins is usually going to be found in the fat content of meat and fish it's also found in cigarette smoke and also herbicides, herbicides are what you spray on your lawn or your lawn service that comes and sprays herbicides on there to kill off the weeds or different types of plants you don't want growing there. It's really hard to avoid dioxins because industrial use has contaminated much of the food supply so really you know eat organic and try to avoid you know animals that have high fat content, milk also has nonorganic milk is going to have higher levels of dioxins than organic milk and personally I would recommend switching over to almond milk hemp milk coconut milk stuff like that and slowly reducing beef intake and your meat intake. So that's dioxins.
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The third xenoestrogen that we're going to talk about is going to be atrazine from our friends not at Cengenta. Now anybody who doesn't know who Cengenta is, Cengenta is the big conglomerate like Monsanto which is destroying the planet with a bunch of chemicals and genetically modified research. Atrazine is a toxic herbicide which is primarily used on corn because so much corn is grown and atrazine is so heavily used, atrazine is a major drinking water contaminant. All the stuff sprayed on the farmlands ultimately leaches back into our water system, and if you think that your local municipal water plant is able to get the atrazine and the xeno estrogen and the pharmaceuticals and the chloride and all the other toxic chemicals out of water, no they cannot do that I mean when you drink tap water you literally drinking a chemical slew of poison, and your body is 8o to 90% water, so when you think about it, the body only wants and needs water yet the water is contaminated especially with all these hormone disrupting chemicals. According to the EPA atrazine is estimated to be the most heavily used herbicide in the US. 75% of the field corn acreage grown in the US is treated with atrazine.
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Mostly the research done by the EPA shows that hormonal activity specifically testosterone, progesterone, leutinizing hormone, estrogen and thyroid hormones are all affected by atrazine. As a matter of fact in 2010 the University of California Berkeley reported that atrazine has gender bending effects on frogs. Microscopic, low levels of atrazine, levels below what the EPA considers safe have turned male frogs into female frogs. Now that is pretty crazy, and not just male friends that look like female frogs, we're talking male to female frogs with completely viable eggs. Atrazine is linked to breast tumors delayed puberty and even prostate cancer so, the best way to avoid atrazine is going to just buy organic produce, people say buying organic is expensive but you have to avoid these things and you know the second way is to get a good water filtration system and try to avoid tapwater, yes it might be a little bit expensive to put a whole house system or under sink system whatever but you're if you ever go out to restaurants and buy bottled water sparkling or in the bottle they had a glass bottle, I mean it's hard, it really is because what are you going to do, all the restaurants cook their food in toxic water I don't know of too many restaurants to cook their food in pure filtered water with no you know xenoestrogens or anything like that I mean the whole purpose is to learn about how you can improve your health to learn about how you balance your hormones naturally even if you do one thing at a time the first step is education you become aware of all the stuff.
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So the number four endocrine disrupting chemical or xenoestrogen I'd like to talk about is phtalates. Phtalates are chemicals used to carry fragrances or soften plastics, they're used in sealants, cosmetics, perfumes, cologne, nail polish, water bottles again because phtalates make plastics flexible they even have phtalates on medications, a lot of medications for example Viagra and birth-control pills are coated with xenoestrogens phtalates which you know, why they are coated with phthalates makes no sense, body care products, plastic flooring adhesives, here's how they work, your body has a way of signaling when a cell should die, now when this is normal you're constantly regenerating new cells, the problem is phthalates prematurely trigger death inducing signal in cells, so instead of the normal process of when your cells are about to die they signals for new cells to start to regrow, with phthalates prematurely trigger the cell inducing signal so your cell sometimes before the're ready to die, die, and the cells that are most vulnerable to phthalates are going to be your testicular cells in men so phthalates have a direct relationship affecting hormones lowering sperm count, cause reproductive system birth defects, thyroid irregularities and they can also affect fertility and libido.
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The Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, the ones that just have absolutely no oversight over this toxic stuff and allow everything toxic to try to block everything natural, they require most cosmetic ingredients to be listed but here's the problem, they offer a loophole for fragrances so their formulas are considered these companies' formulas are considered proprietary secrets of the manufacturer can simply use the term fragrance on the label. The thing about phtalates is that the're a common ingredient in the air fresheners that most people use in their car and spray all over the place. Matter of fact 75% of US households use some sort of air freshener. So the California EPA warns that both are developmental because some of these fragrances might say 'all natural' they might say 'unscented' but two phtalates that are popular are known as DEP and DVP and both are developmental toxins and harmful to the female and male reproductive tract, but the thing is you never know about these because you can't, they're not listed on the label, there's no requirements, although in the European Union they've banned phthalates in cosmetics and children's toys in 2004 and 14 other countries have banned phthalates except for the US. Those other countries have also banned fluoride and a lot of the other toxic chemicals. The problem is that in those other countries people are actually standing up and saying this is a problem let's bring it to the legislator let's bring it to our local government agencies we can do something about it. So in one human study boys born to mothers with high phthalate urine levels were more likely to have smaller penises scrotums and undescended testicles. Here's another one, boys born to mothers with the highest level of phthalates were 4 to 10 times more likely to have reduced genital development. One study in Puerto Rico found that phthalates cause premature breast development in girls younger than eight. A 2005 study for instance suggested that phthalates could affect the genital development of boys and other research has associated the chemicals with the early onset of puberty in girls. According to Greenpeace, testing by an independent laboratory found phthalates in 21 out of 30 samples of children's products purchased from China.Why is that important because kids end up chewing on plastic toys all the time. So how do you avoiud phthalates? Well one thing I'm going to talk about over and over and over is regular body cleansing, I mean a lot of these things we're to be exposed to in a regular basis and we just need to keep cleansing our body and cleansing our body, especially until you can get all this stuff out, one thing that's been lost is the fact that we're just accumulating toxins and not doing anything about it.
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So cleansing the body regularly, avoiding the toxic chemical-based air fresheners, minimizing exposure to plastic toys, plastic wrap, food containers, body care and cosmetics, hygiene products, big source of phthalates you know if you have anything in your bathroom makeup, body lotion, shampoo, any of that stuff most likely every single thing in there's going to be an endocrine disruptor and you're going be absorbing that through your skin which is your largest organ, so one of the things you're going to do you need to either go down each ingredient that you don't understand on the label and type that ingredient in and then type in phthalate or endocrine disrupting chemical and you'll be able to pull up if that chemical's an endocrine disruptor, or you can just look at all those body care products and see if they contain 'fragrance', 'natural fragrance' or anything like that on the label and most likely it's going to have phthalates.
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The next xenoestrogen is perchlorate which is really rocket fuel believe it or not and it's chemically similar to the harmful halogens and it competes with iodine and can disrupt your thyroid hormones by causing harm to the iodine transpores and we're going to talk later on how important iodine actually is at balancing your hormones naturally, but the reason I want to mention rocket fuel is it can throw your metabolism out and it even affects your brain and organ development especially in kids, Perchlorates been found in 93% of the nation's milk and lettus supply in an FDA study. Because it's in the big rivers because of the run off from the jet fuel and the rocket fuel and all the other stuff that is coming down into the water, in the rain that is going into all the rivers and all the rivers are used, especially the Colorado River to irrigate a lot of the farms and when you take toxic water from the river and irrigate your farms well then guess what you have all those toxic chemicals in your food and ultimately in the water supply. Drinking water in 22 states has extremely high levels of perchlorate. Here's a statistic is that perchlorate has been found in the breastmilk of 97% of the mothers who were tested, and according to the EPA perchlorate is detrimental to the thyroid gland, metabolism and hormone balance.
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So how do you avoid perchlorate? Well number one you get enough iodine in your system to load the receptor site so your thyroid is not to be damaged, you want to drink purified water because perchlorate is a contaminant in most tap water and you want to try to eat organic foods as much as possible, keep coming back to the water and the organic foods because you're going to at least drastically reduce the amount of these chemicals if you are consuming pure clean water and pure clean organic foods especially if you grow your own food.
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Next thing is fire retardants. Fire retardants contain polybrominated, bromine is a toxic halogen again, diphenyl ether, they're called PBDE's. Now fire retardants disrupt hormonal activity and the way they do it is they imitate your thyroid hormones. They really affect cognitive function, and flame retardants, are in a lot of building materials while at work you might be exposed to the building materials. When you rip out carpet you know that foam under the carpet usually has high levels of fire retardants. Reupholstering furniture with the foam in there. So in 2007 mattresses sold in the US are required to have flame retardants on them, just obviously so if there's a fire in your room you don't catch fire. But these companies are heavily dosing them especially these memory foam mattresses are the worst because people buy these memory foam mattress and then they sleep there and not only the fire retardants but all these other chemicals these foams are made out of leach out and then you sit there and breathe these all the time all the time and then you know while you're sleeping your sleep is disturbed, and these are all endocrine disrupting or hormonal imbalancing chemicals.
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So avoid any products with brominated fire retardants and you know next time you buy curtains next time you buy fabrics next time you buy whatever you're going to buy, furniture for your house carpet, all that, you want to ask the manufacturer what type of chemicals what type of fire retardants and the type of material your carpets and everything are made of, a lot of them are actually made with petroleum based products,it's likethat statistic of a baby crawling on a standard floor ingales the equivalent of four cigarettes on a daily basis due to the amount of chemicals released in dust mites and all the other stuff that are on the floor in most houses with toxic carpet etc.
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The next endocrine disrupting chemical I'd like to talk about is perfluorinated chemicals, we talked about brominated, just to back up the toxic halogens are fluoride, bromine, chlorine, and the other halogen is iodine and that's the good one, so there's the bad ones and those are the things that we want to look out for that wreck havok on the endocrine system, especially your thyroid. So perfluorinated chemicals are like brominated except with a fluoride compound in them and this is your nonstick cookware everybody uses, the Teflon's and the waterproof coatings people put on their decking outside, spray on their shoes everything else. Most people wouldn't think that their Teflon and frying pan would release endocrine disrupting chemicals but those have been linked to decreased sperm count and 99% of Americans have these in their homes. So another sad thing is these things never really breakdown in the environment and as you get rid of these and go to the toxic dumps and everything it just keeps contaminating the system and contaminating the system.
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Actually a lot of the microwave food bags that contain different types of foods that you heat up in the microwave, those actually also contain perfluorinated compounds phthalates and toxic chemicals too, so how avoid those? Stay away from nonstick cookware and replace that with non-toxic ceramic-based nonchemical base cookware and for baking material use silicone, probably one of the best and that we use all the different types of ceramic type non-non-toxic a bunch of them out
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The next type of endocrine disruptor is glycol ethers and that's used in paint cleaning products and cosmetics as well, you know you see proprelyne glycol and a lot of different cosmetics, there are a few problems associated with these. First, animal studies have shown that glycol ethers shrink the testicles, if you notice a lot of these things really affect the males reproduction system, and that's still pretty serious considering that a lot of times when a couple can't get pregnant at times the woman is blamed but I can tell you from experience, a lot of fertility and infertility issues, where we've issued cleansing, a lot of the time the majority of time it's the male that has the problem, at least in the last 10 to 15 years. So how do you avoid glycol ethers, you avoid toxic cleaning products around your house, what I would do is go around your house, look at all the cleaning products that you have and replace those with non-toxic cleaning products that don't contain any of these chemicals. I personally use and recommend Branch basic, something that works awesome but there are plenty of organic all-natural cleaning products out there, order online or make your own, you can type in how to make DIY cleaning products or how to make your own organic cleaning products and you can just useorganic vinegar and water, there's many different types of recipes orange oil with water vinegar stuff add a little hydrogen peroxide in there, there's plenty of recipes that you can use that are going to produce endocrine disrupting chemicals.
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Now the next endocrine disruptor is lead. Now there's not as much lead around anymore as there used to be,but it's horrible to your whole body, I mean it can cause brain damage, it can lower your IQ, hearing loss, miscarriages, premature birth, increase blood pressure and kidney damage, nervous system potential problems but as far as hormones are concerned lead reduces the sex hormones and disrupts the hormone signaling process that controls how your bodies handle stress. Now 2013 study found that lead exposure can have disastrous effects on the reproductive system at 2012 study Turkish research found that chronic lead exposure was a factor responsible for erectile dysfunction. Sources of lead because they had to remove it from the paint but anything in your house that was painted before 1976 most likely still has a lot of lead and that can include toys, as a matter of fact they're still finding lead in toys coming from China right now so that can be another source anything for that matter painted outside of the US and imported in could contain lead and these are some of the sources, bullets if you handle bullets a lot, curtain weights, some of the old silver candleholders that contain lead fishing sinkers or lead fishing weights, might have some lead in some of your pipes in your house, sink faucets might have some lead and can contaminated drinking water that's why eventually what I recommend is when you redo the piping of an old house use pex tubing which is a high density polyethylene which is not going to emit any type of plastic or any type of endocrine disrupting chemicals and it's not made of metal, a lot of these metals have different compounds in them that can over time rust and put stuff in your water system.
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Perhaps old paint sets, art supplies, jewelry, doing pottery lead figure stuff like that so those are some of the things I would recommend you look for around your house and then try to eliminate, or if you're in a job that has any type of exposure to that then limit that exposure, get out of that job, the best way to get let out your system is to do chemical and heavy metal cleansing on a regular basis and that's one of the reasons I'm so big again on cleansing.
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Definitely with the water again, coming back to water, purifying the water. The next endocrine disrupting chemical which is a poison is arsenic. Arsenic contamination of food and water is absolutely rampant. Arsenic affects hormones usually in the glutocordicoid system which is what controls how your body processes carbohydrates and sugars. When this process is disrupted it's going to cause weight gain, could cause weight loss, suppress your immune system make you more susceptible to diabetes osteoporosis and even high blood pressure. I definitely noticed and the pharmaceutical companies have noticed a massive spike in high blood pressure osteoporosis diabetes weight gain all these things, all this is directly related to hormone disruptors and other chemical disruptors and toxins that people are exposed to on a regular basis. The biggest exposure point for arsenic is the water tap water, air soil and pesticides so again drinking clean water going organic clean food cleanin up the water in your house you take a shower in and also cleaning the air in your house as well you know a good air purification system, I use the remy units which produce ionize Hydro peroxides doesn't really matter some air cleaners are better than others but you definitely want to clean the air constantly in your home.
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Next endocrine disrupting metal is actually mercury, now most people don't know that mercury really damages the endocrine system, it's contaminated a massive portion of the seafood supply and new warnings just came out the other day concerning it's danger for pregnant women because of it's effects on fetal brain development. So mercury binds to hormones that regulate the menstrual cycle and ovulation. This hormone interferes, whenever you have mercury interference it's damaging to the pancreas's ability to produce insulin and can also lead to diabetes. That's just the hormonal issues, that's not the many of the other problems that mercury causes within the system, and mercury's containing in vaccines, flu shots, all your dental amalgams, mercury's been linked hypothyroidism thyroid damage, autoimmune thyroiditis and impairs the T4 to T3 conversion which are two thyroid hormones. Mercury sources like I said that you need worry about is in water, there's actually Mercury pollution coming over in the air from China now so it's getting in our soil, so it's one of those things where you just need to avoid it as much as possible by drinking purified water again reducing the amount of seafood, especially the bigger the fish is the higher level of mercury it's going to contain obviously, so if you go to Global Healing Center and type in mercury in the search bar we had a all the levels of all the fishes there so it'd be a good idea to read more about that learn about how you can avoid mercury more often, if you do have dental mercury amalgams highly highly recommend you little biological dentist and get those removed because you're going to constantly be releasing mercury into your brain and .
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The next thing to talk about is DDT. DDT is not around as much as it was early on but DDT is still a huge problem, it's a pesticide and it has damaging and feminizing effects. Here's a shocking study that I want to read to you in the 1950s two Syracuse biologists showed that DDT stoped roosters from developing into normal adult roosters. DDT was injected into rooster chicks, they didn't get sick or die but they grew to resemble hens, their growth was stunted and they had testicles 18% of normal size, so basically the DDT effectively castrated the roosters and that is just a chemical that was sprayed everywhere, I've seen some of the commercials from back in the day in the 50s where they were spraying clouds of DDT over the children saying it's safe, just spraying pesticides on you everything is okay, so researchers at UC Davis found that injecting seagul eggs with DDE which is a breakdown product of DDT and another chemical a pesticide that binds to estrogen receptors caused the gulls reproductive tract to become female, even the male testicles contained female cells and the male gulls exposed to higher doses of the pesticidecombination even developed the egg laying tunnel the ovaduct that only the female gulls have.These pesticides and herbicides if you trace them back were developed by the Nazis for chemical warfare during World War two. After the war American scientists used the same chemistry to create pesticides and herbicides which are still used today. According to the USGS more than 88,000 tons of glyphosate from Monsanto were used in the United States in 2007, that was up 11,000 tons in 1992 and now two billion tons of pesticides are used annually in the United States, two billion tons of endocrine disrupting chemicals are being sprayed on our farmland throughout the United States and its increasing and increasing and increasing because these plants are developing immunity to, these herbicides the plants and weeds are developing immunity, so they keep having to spray more and more on there. 2009 Spanish research found that without a doubt the glyphosate based herbicides are toxic and endocrine disruptors, human organophosphate exposure hurts brain development and fertility, lowers testosterone and thyroid hormone levels. Here's more, in 1985 it was known that organophosphate exposure decreased testosterone levels, why if it was known scientifically in 1985 that organophosphate exposure decreased testosterone levels and toxic why these companies were still allowed to spray billions of tons on all of our plants, that's because of the money and the inside workings of the lobbyist with the oil gas and the chemical industry, the pharmaceutical companies and everything just works together. Organophosphate have been linked to lowered IQ levels and increased rates of a ADHD rates in children. American Association of Poison Control Centers estimate that over 100,000 poisonings annually in America are due to pesticides.So why are they a problem, pesticides mimic estrogen.
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So now moving to you shortly are GMO foods because about 88% of the corn and 94% of the soy is now genetically modified and this is where we get a lot of our food and that's why it's a good idea to switch to organic. While we're talking about organic produce, GMO foods exacerbate hormone problems by attacking the largest endocrine organ the intestines and this is why GMO's are such a problem because corn and soy and canola oil cottonseed oil and a lot of the things that these foods are made with can cause health issues because our bodies don't process genetically modified foods the same as non-GMO foods. In 2012 a study that suggested that sex hormones are vulnerable to GMO and Roundup treatments. Corn is in everything we eat and almost all corn is GMO and it's doused with glyphosate which is round up, everybody's heard and everybody has around I'm sure you probably have Roundup in your garage somewhere that you spray on all the weeds, so you know, the more people that use it and how we get around is everybody needs to stop buying and supporting these main companies that are messing everybody up and they spray their yard with all this Roundup and they spray and the children run out in the yard and play then get all these endocrine disrupting chemicals. Of course we're told that only insects are affected by this BT toxin, this BT toxin actually blows the stomach up of insects that eat is actually a programed into the corn, mostly corn but other GMO plants so when the insects eat it it blows up their stomach and works as an insecticide but it actually now has been found harmful to the human digestive tract and is what causes leaky syndrome.
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So the G.I. tract is your largest endocrine organ so if you disrupt the G.I. tract you're actually going to have disruption from allowing these estrogens not to be broken down properly and these perforations in the gut to allow all these endocrine disrupting chemicals to pass directly into the bloodstream, so it's very important to try to avoid any genetically modified foods look on the label, buy organic, again educate yourself, throw out any Roundup or any herbicides that you might have around your house that's how you are going to avoid these things.
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Cosmetics is a huge huge problem because the cosmetics industry has almost 0 oversight and is hugely at fault for these hormone disrupting products, perfumes colognes basically 99% of the fragrances used in cosmetics are synthetic chemicals produced from a benzene ring or a phenyl group. You have to be a chemist but these rings when you have a benzyl group or a phenyl group fit into estrogen receptors. So cosmetics have a ton of xenoestrogen chemicals and these xenoestrogen chemicals mimic estrogen, they're fat-soluble which you know estrogen is absorbed in fat and the problem is all these cosmetics are absorbed through your skin they stimulate the estrogen receptors in the breasts and cause fibrocystic breast disease and can even cause cancer. In fact 2008 study showed, it was called 'Are lipsticks changing your cup size?' and basically showed that the lipstick even has endocrine disrupting chemicals that can change your cup size. Sunscreens, makeup, the thing that concerns me a lot how many parents who want to protect their kids slather them up with all this sunscreen anytime they go outside and it's a major problem, it's been shown now that sunscreen has endocrine disruptors in it and actually initiates skin cancer. In one test a chemical common in sunscreen was mixed with olive oil and applied to rat skin, it doubled the uterine growth. Who would have ever thought that sunscreen was going disrupt hormones in children and adults. So I would recommend, like we talked about earlier, go through all your cosmetics, everything you slather on your skin and make sure that you switch to organic or natural sources, and I mean, I know people that apply sunscreen to their kids twice a day every single day, even the things that we talk about today, if you were to make one change a week, you're still going to be making progress, switching over to natural organic things instead of toxic things.
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Another endocrine disrupting product that most people don't even know about is laundry detergent. When detergents in general breakdown they release alkylphenols. Alkylphenols have infiltrated the water supply and they been shown to create hermaphrodite fish. In 2004 fish that were half male and half female were discovered below the sewage treatment plants in Denver and in Boulder Colorado and eventually people drink this water so, lookout for dry cleaning, when you drycleaner your clothes make sure you go to a natural drycleaner because when you put those close on you sweat, your skin absorbs some of those chemicals in. Look at your laundry detergent, what are you sing to wash your kids' and your families' clothes with? Switch to an organic all-natural laundry detergent.
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So estrogens, some of the other things, unfortunately synthetic hormones from medications are also being found in the drinking water, every time a woman on the pill goes to the bathroom minute ammounts of hormones end of going to the water supply. So again make sure that you are drinking clean water. A natural endocrine disruptor is soy, we touched on it with the GMOs but soy is a big time product that I recommend everybody avoid, and soy is in everything these days, look at the label you'll see soy lechithin, soy proteins, soy this, soy that. First of all most of the soy is GMO, secondly soy contains phytoestrogens. Now fermented soy is going to be a lot safer for you to eat, but we already have estrogen dominance, and so my recommendation is to not increase the amount of estrogen in your body but to decrease it, so one ofthe things I recommend highly is that you avoid soy and the phytoestrogens in soy.
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Some of the other food things that you might not know about that might have endocrine disrupting things is gluten. Gluten is something that I have studied for a long time and I must admit I was eating wheat and always felt rundown and low-energy but gluten has been shown to affect the thyroid, and it's not just people that are gluten intolerant, it's everybody. Anyone who has thyroid disorders, and it might not be labeled as gluten intolerant, is gluten intolerant. As a matter of fact gluten has a molecular structure that closely resembles the thyroid gland and when its' proteins pass through your gut and into your bloodstream, your immune system tags it for destruction. It doesn't matter if you have a gluten insensitivity or not, the fact is every single person on the planet is allergic to gluten because your immune system will tag it as a toxin no matter what. Because the protein is so similar to the thyroid, the thyroid gets attacked too, and the immune system's response to gluten in the body can last up to six months each time you consume it. Now that is a fact that I found that I did not know and is incredibly startling to me and that's why I do not eat any gluten. You eat gluten and then your immune system can be depressed for up to six months each time you consume gluten. So gluten is an endocrine disruptor, avoid gluten, it's absolutely vital to completely eliminate gluten from your diet. You don't have to do it right now all of a sudden, it's kind of hard to go gluten free, type in online 'how to go gluten free', and there's lots of sources out there.
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The next source is fluoride which was identified as an endocrine disruptor in a 2006 report that stated that fluoride effects normal endocrine function or response, although not in the sense of mimicking a natural hormone. So really it affects the thyroid the pancreas the pineal gland and parathyroid and most of your fluoride exposure is going to come through water sources, so again to eliminate fluoride as an endocrine disruptor drink purified water.
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Aluminum is also an endocrine disruptor and that's in the chemtrails that you see overhead that there's high levels of aluminum falling if you don't kknow what chemtrails are it's proven the government has, it's documented it's not a conspiracy, yes they're spraying high levels of aluminum nanoparticles all over the United States and all over the world in an attempt to 'cool the earth' and through global warming, so aluminum cans aluminum deodorants, what you want to do is limit your sources of aluminum.
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The next toxic endocrine disruptor is aspartame. If anyone out there is drinking diet drinks or diet sodas anything that's sugar-free, make sure it doesn't have aspartame in it. There were studies done at the University in South Africa that shows that aspartame is a potent neurotoxin, it's been shown to be an endocrine disruptor, University of Barcelona showed that aspartame is transformed into formaldehyde in the bodies of living specimens and formaldehyde is also a toxic endocrine disruptor, aspartame is also found in water supplies, so highly recommend you limit all aspartame.
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Parabens are preservatives used in deodorants, makeup, body lotions, moisturizers, cosmetic products. Look for parabens, and if you have parabens in your product that's an endocrine disruptor, again go to natural sources instead. Triclosan it's a germ killing ingredient in soaps, deodorants, even toothpaste. As a matter of fact Minnesota just banned triclosan which is great it's going to be the first state, and again it's going to be in water supplies so look at all the soaps which you're using, all the handheld soaps and stuff like that. Also if you're viewing prescription medications online, we talked about it, you want to look online ingredients in a prescription medication phthalates are in a lot of drug coatings a lot of the psychotropic drugs, antidepressants, and antianxiety medications those have endocrine disrupting chemicals in them.
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Alcohol can make your endocrine system behave in a sloppy way just like someone who's had too many drinks, alcohol affects blood sugar levels, reproductive function, calcium metabolism, it can interfere with the testes and ovaries, can result in hormone deficiencies, sexual dysfunction and alcohol can even result in infertility. Alcohol's been shown to be toxic to the testes, reduces testosterone levels in men here's a study normal healthy men who received alcohol for four weeks had their testosterone levels decline after only five days, and the levels continue to fall throughout the study period.
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So if you're trying to balance your hormones naturally, these are the things which you are going to want to avoid and I'm going to post these notes under this video on the Global Healing Center site so you can look through all my notes and have references to the studies. I know this is getting long but I wanted to cover all these things because there are so many different topics on hormone balancing and so many people are looking out there 'how do I balance my hormones?' You balance your hormones by avoiding hormone disrupting chemicals. So for premenopausal women for example alcohol contributes to irregular menstrual cycles, menstrual cycles without ovulation, early menopause and increase risk of spontaneous abortions. Postmenopausal women who drink have higher estradiol levels than those who don't alcohol can increase the conversion of testosterone into estradiol. Bottom line alcohol is not good if you're trying to balance your hormones or trying to get pregnant. Another thing I'd like to focus on is stress. stress is important, it's important to minimize your stress, skipping meals, overexercising, underexercising, bad sleep, processed foods, refined sugars, all the chemicals and toxins that we talk about, when you're stressed, there's stress and distress, we're talking about distress where you're out of balance, stress affects the stress hormones mainly cortisol. Cortisol interferes with your balance of hormones and neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are the chemicals that regulate mood, your emotions and cognitive function. Without hormone balance we don't have neurotransmitter balance, if you don't have neurotransmitter balance we're just in a reactive responsive survival mode, that means you're not in control, your fight or flight a sympathetic state and that's not the way to live, we want to be in the parasympathetic state. Stress has been shown to decrease progesterone levels and make your body think more estrogen is there. That's because progesterone is the precursor form which all other hormones are created including adrenal hormones. So a stressful situation increases production of corticosteroids to defend against the stress but if you're constantly stressed your body can't produce enough progesterone and that would lead to adrenal exhaustion, that's why a lot of people right now are suffering with adrenal fatigue, they're constantly fatigued.
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So just to recap the pesticides in food and water, toxic metals, industrial chemicals, poisoning cosmetic products, phthalates, BPA, might sound like a lot but it's really about avoiding and learning how to read the labels and avoid all these things. So now I'm going to go over some natural solutions these are some things you can do, it's not a bad idea to get a baseline of where your hormones are, working with a natural practitioner, someone who specializes in endocrine balancing, stuff like that who can take some blood urine and saliva tests to measure hormones as a baseline, but I can tell you that will happen is as soon as you get your tests and you hormone levels back, if you avoid all these things and you continue to clean your body then most likely those tests are going to be more close to normal every time you go in, instead of that individual putting you on hormone replacement therapy. Always look at what is the natural way to balance hormones. Hormone balancing is really a fountain of youth if you think about it, it's important for women and men you talk about hormones and most think it's just for women but more and more men are having hormone problems and they just don't realize it, so it's very important to balance them out and the solution number one out of everything else is to cleanse your body, cleanse your body, cleanse your body. Internal body cleansing is the most effective way to encourage normal hormone balancing, and for fertility for that matter, we had a fertility program all we would do we had people come in saying 'I couldn't get pregnant' they were spending $250,000 on IVF, different types of fertility programs everything, I said okay let's clean your body let's go through an intestinal cleanse, a couple liver and gallbladder cleanses, a heavy metal cleanse, parasite cleranse, we didn't even get into parasites but parasites can extract and go to the bathroom in your body, and what they extract is different types of phenols formaldehyde and endocrine disrupting chemicals, so parasite cleansing, kidney cleansing, all that and we just had them go through a round of cleansing and then sure enough within two or three months their body is so clean and they're avoiding all the endocrine disrupting chemicals that they got pregnant and they had a healthy baby and so that's what I recommend, everybody do this before they get pregnant but anyone who is having thyroid any type of symptoms, endocrine disrupting chemicals, hormonal imbalance, have to clean clean clean and one of the big things is cleaning the liver, because over half of all the T4 is converted to T3 in the liver. that's a thyroid hormone. If that conversion is obstructed or compromised, hormones are going to be out of sync. For that matter most estrogen is metabolized in the liver and if it's not metabolized it just lingers and causes problems so that's why it's so important to have your liver functioning correctly and your GI tract, which is the largest endocrine organ, and hormones are secreted by the stomach, pancras, small intestine, that's why the GI tract needs to be healthy. If you're not having two bowel movements a day, if you're not able to eliminate properly and you have constipation or gas or bloating or any type of GI issues, it can cause estrogen and leaky gut that to be reabsorbed into the blood and all these phytoestrogen and all these endocrine disrupting chemicals, so that's why I recommend keeping your intestines clean on a regular basis using oxypowder a couple times a week just keeping everything cleaned, using some good probiotics, primaldefense ultra, the lateral flora, but that's what I use. Then, solution number two is regular chemical and toxic metal cleansing and that's getting rid of any mercury, lead, cadmium, aluminum. You have to continually clean the chemicals out of your body, if they're coming in you have to get rid of them. I use Zeotrex for that you can use whatever you want, but these are the solutions.
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Solution number three is to increase your exercise because naturally with exercise when you sweat, well actually weight training by itself increases adrenal hormones and beta receptors in gut fat, and when you rest and recover, all that is therapeutic. Chiropractic, massage, meditation, sauna, far infrared saunas another way to eliminate that toxic metals and chemicals. So increasing your exercise and your bodywork, allowing your body to become natural and unstressed, acupuncture also to work on rebalancing your hormones through bodywork. Solution number four is decrease your stress, that's something that's part of everybody's life and you can be stressed out just by sitting under fluorescent lighting, the way I deal with stress is meditation. Besides that, one of the best ways that I feel that reduces and calms a stressful situation is meditation, besides that studies showed a meditation dramatically boost DHEA levels and stress lowers melatonin, when you're stressed you're going to have lower melatonin levels and people who meditate are able to maintain healthy levels melatonin by reducing the stress and restoring balance and they sleep better also, so deep meditation has been shown to dramatically boost levels of human growth hormone also and serotonin. Cortisol is one of the hormones you want the less amounts of and meditation has been proven to significantly decrease levels of cortisol, so I recommend starting off with about nine minutes twice a day meditation, some techniques and the breathing techniques you can go online and look at different meditation techniques online but started nine minutes twice a day and then move up as much.
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Solution number five is get restful sleep. I can't say that enough you know your body needs to do heal when you sleep that means not having a bunch of electronics around your bed not having lights blinking when you sleep, a dark environment, not sleeping is going to affect your hormones, it's going to negatively affect your hormones. Follicle stimulating hormones and leutinizing hormones are among the hormones released during your sleep, thyroid stimulating hormones are released pior to sleep. Deep sleep has been shown to increase the release of human growth hormone and even in 2011 a study found that infant growth spurts were associated with increased and consolidated sleep, this is directly a result of the increase of growth hormone during sleep. So sleep is extremely important. Next solution number six is to eliminate the endocrine disrupting chemicals, eating organic fruits and vegetables avoiding pesticides, avoiding soy, aspartame, artificial sweeteners, non-toxic cookware, if you're drinking coffee make sure that you switch to organic coffee because 80% of the coffee sprayed with toxic pesticides which are endocrine disruptors. So if you go over there to your favorite coffee shop in the morning you're getting endocrine disruptors in the milk and most likely the tap water that they use to make the coffee. Avoid GMOs, whean you eat meat make sure it's organic, only range free eggs, avoid sugary and processed foods don't drink from aluminum cans, not canned foods, limit your alcohol consumption, cook with distilled or purified water, don't microwave food, avoid containers with BPA, avoid plastic cutting boards and all that stuff cutting utensils use bamboo or you can use even ceramic knives these days, use non-toxic detergent for dishwasher for laundry detergent, get rid of all your chemical fertilisers and herbicides and all that stuff in your garage, look at all your cosmetics, body care products, switch to organic all-natural non-toxic, these are all hormone disruptors. There are some natural supplements too depending on your hormonal imbalances stemming from you might want to take dietary supplements and recommend working with natural health care practitioner after looking at all the causes and eliminating all those, most likely your hormones will balance anyway, but one of the things that I recommend for everybody not just people that are suffering from hormone deficiencies, iodine wekeep coming back to that and coming back that, I suggest that you look at iodine webinar that's out there, but without a doubt is going to play one of the biggest roles in maintaining balance hormones, the entire body needs iodine, every single endocrine cell needs iodine, but it's really used heavily by three organs which is the thyroid, the breast tissue and ovaries, men also use iodine in the reproductive organs prostate testes, so highly recommend you watch that. Some herbs you might want to check out that are effective in balancing the hormones naturally Tribulus terrestris, suma root, ashwagandha, maca or Peruvian ginseng, avena sativa, tongkat ali, wild yams, some of the cohoshes. The first thing is to get rid of the things causing your hormone disruption and second is to clean your body as best as you possibly can, once you have all that done then I would look into using or supplementing different hormone supplements. I use androtrex which contains a lot of these things, for males naturaly your hormones are going to decrease with age, naturaly a woman's hormones are going to be altered during age, what can you do naturaly to regulate some of that, cleansing of course, as long as you're in a natural state that's what you want. I developed a product called female fusion to help balance out hormones naturaly. Hormone replacement therapy is not a good idea, just putting a bandaid over a problem, first of all if your hormones are imbalanced you need to get to the root cause of that, not just add more hormones especially synthetic hormones to the mix and that is what bioidentical hormone replacement therapy is just pharmaceutical hormones which you don't know where they're getting from with molecules that are exact copies of human hormones, but any hormone you taking from pharmaceutical company has to be synthesized and they might say it's the same thing when synthetic hormones are similar but they're not and they tend to fit less precisely on your hormone receptors and that's why the ugly side effects that you might've seen in the news lately the testosterone replacement therapy is associated with heart problems there menopausal hormone therapy has cancer risks so if you're on HRT it's imperative that your intestinal health is at the highest to eliminate toxins prevent the hormones from being absorbed in your gut and also probiotics are within balance.
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We all need to do this to not only save ourselves save the children but to save the Earth, we're losing 200 species a day a lot of this has to do with chemicals. Until next time look around your house start today eliminating these toxic chemicals from the environment and start cleansing."
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Are Plastic Water Bottles Causing you to Gain Weight and Contribute to Diabetes & Cancer?
An overweight man takes a drink of water after a long workout.by Cat Ebeling & Mike Geary
co-authors of the best-sellers: The Fat Burning Kitchen & The Top 101 Foods that Fight Aging
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Surrounded by a sea of plastic and hormone-disrupting chemicals that includes plastic water bottles, plastic soda bottles, plastic bags, plastic food containers, soaps, shampoos, food packaging and pans treated with nonstick coatings, studies are showing definite connections between plastic compounds and serious diseases like diabetes and obesity. Not only that, but more and more evidence is also pointing to other serious health issues such as infertility, hormone-related reproductive cancers, neurological issues and other disorders.
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Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC’s) also referred to as “Xenoestrogens” or synthetic estrogens, cause serious health problems because they mimic estrogen among other hormones. By hijacking important chemical messengers in the body, EDC’s actually can change the way cells develop and grow. These chemicals are showing up in men, women, breastfeeding mothers and babies.
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Xenoestrogens actually amplify the effect of estrogen in the body. These toxic hormones actually can build up over time, creating an overload of estrogen. Individuals with any kind of estrogen dominance health condition (such as breast or ovarian cancer) should be especially careful to avoid xenoestrogens. And this is especially harmful to men.
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Xenoestrogens have been linked to feminization in men (man boobs, loss of testosterone, low sperm counts, etc.), infertility, and unnaturally early puberty in girls. This buildup of synthetic female hormones increases the risk of reproductive cancer as well.
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Exposure of lab species and wild animals to xenoestrogens has been found to cause abnormalities in the reproductive systems of these animals. Xenoestrogens bind to estrogen receptors in both animals and humans including: reproductive tissue, body fat, the hypothalamus, and pituitary glands. And, studies in mice show that xenoestrogens can cause progressive degeneration of testicular tissue and sexual dysfunction in both sexes.
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According to Andrea C. Gore, Professor of Pharmacology at University of Texas, and chair of a task force on hormone disrupting chemicals, “The evidence is more definitive than ever—EDC’s disrupt hormones in a manner that harms human health. Hundreds of studies are pointing to the same conclusion…You may have a healthy meal, but if it’s in a plastic container [or cooked in a nonstick pan], it’s leaching chemicals.”
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Based on information from over 1,300 studies, there is strong evidence to show a link between common hormone disrupting chemicals and serious health issues such as:
• Type 2 Diabetes
• Obesity
• Heart disease
• Infertility/Impotence
• Hormone-sensitive cancers in women (breast, endometrial, ovarian)
• Prostate cancer
• Thyroid problems
• Poor brain development and brain function in young children
• Feminization in men: low sperm count, breast development
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While there are about 85,000 chemicals known to be in use, it is not known for sure how many of these chemicals actually disrupt hormones, but at least 1,000 are known human toxins.
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Some of the known EDCs include bisphenol A (BPA) found in food can linings, cash register receipts; phthalates found in plastics and cosmetics; flame retardant chemicals and various pesticides. The chemicals are so common that nearly every person on Earth has been exposed to at least one or more of these.
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And a mother’s exposure to even tiny amounts of EDCs during her pregnancy can trigger obesity in her child. These EDCs can target cells in the pancreas, the liver and the fat cells in the body, leading the way for insulin resistance, and high insulin levels which are direct risk factors for the development of Type 2 diabetes.
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When looking at just one of these endocrine disrupting chemicals, it was found that having higher BPA levels was associated with a diabetes rate 50% higher than having lower levels of this harmful chemical!
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Two other chemicals, di-isononyl phthalate (DINP) and di-isodecyl phthalate (DIDP), both known as ‘phthalates’, used in plastic food wrap, soaps, cosmetics and food containers have been directly linked to insulin resistance and diabetes in children and adolescents, as well as high blood pressure.
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These chemicals are not the only offenders. Endocrine disrupting chemicals and xenoestrogens also include:
• Bisphenol A (BPA) and bisphenol S, which are used in some plastics, metal food cans, and cash register receipts
• Phthalates, a class of chemicals that are used to soften plastic and also used in some perfumes, soaps, shampoos, and cosmetics
• Some pesticides, like DDT
• Triclosan, an antibacterial chemical
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These chemicals can act at very low doses.
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EDC’s, which include xenoestrogens, can be found in pesticides, plastics, fuels, personal care products preservatives and drugs. Below is a partial list of some of the EDC’s we come into contact with on a daily basis:
• alkylphenols (chemicals used in the manufacture of other chemicals)
• atrazine (a common household weed killer)
• 4-Methylbenzylidene camphor (sunscreen lotions)
• 4-hexylresorcinol (color preservative for shrimp and shellfish).
• butylated hydroxyanisole / BHA (a very common food preservative)
• bisphenol A (used in plastics including food containers and water bottles)
• DDT (insecticide)
• erythrosine / FD&C Red No. 3 (food coloring)
• ethinylestradiol (oral contraceptive pill)
• heptachlor (insecticide)
• nonylphenol and derivatives (surfactants, cleansers, emulsifiers for detergents; pesticides)
• pentachlorophenol (wood preservative)
• polychlorinated biphenyls / PCBs (oils, lubricants, adhesives, paints)
• parabens (skin lotions)
• phenosulfothiazine (red dye)
• phthalates (plasticizers)
• DEHP (plasticizer for PVC/polyvinyl chloride used in pipes and many other applications)
• Propyl gallate (used to protect oils and fats in foods from oxidation)
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Many of the EDC’s listed above are contained in processed, packaged foods and in conventionally-grown, non-organic produce as either preservatives and/or pesticides.
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Another group of xenoestrogens is found in commercially-raised dairy, meat and eggs. Commercial dairy and egg farmers often feed estrogenic chemicals to milk cows and chickens because it will increase production of milk and eggs. Commercially-raised meat and dairy get a double dose of xenoestrogens from the pesticides they ingest in their feed source as well. This alone makes commercial dairy, eggs and meat major sources of xenoestrogens.
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Yes, this list can be mind-boggling and overwhelming. So what are the top ten endocrine disrupting items to avoid? Let’s take a look at this list Dr. Joseph Mercola recently published:
- Pthlatates in personal care products
- Tap water AND individual plastic water bottles
- Canned foods
- Conventionally grown produce
- Conventionally raised meat, poultry and dairy
- Fish containing mercury
- Kitchen products—nonstick cookware, plastic storage containers
- Cleaning products
- Office products—printer’s ink and toner
- Cash register receipts
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Yes, we are surrounded by these chemicals in every aspect of our lives, and they are hard to avoid. Here are some ways to minimize your exposure EDC’s and xenoestrogens:
• Avoid all synthetic pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides by eating organic whenever possible, especially the “dirty dozen*” of the highest sprayed produce.
• Avoid using pesticides and herbicides outdoors, especially on your lawn.
• Avoid all plastic containers, especially individual sized water bottles, and plastic food containers. Do not store hot food in plastic. Use glass whenever possible.
• Avoid microwaving in plastic and avoid using plastic wrap.
• Avoid using nail polish, avoid acrylic nails and nail polish remover
• Avoid lotions, hair products and cosmetics that are not “all-natural”. Especially avoid products containing parabens. Unfortunately, the more inexpensive brands usually have the most toxic ingredients.
• Eat only organic, grass fed meats and wild caught fatty fish as much as possible. Consume only organic dairy products.
• Use organic, natural soaps and toothpastes.
• Use natural household cleaners.
• Use only naturally based perfume or essential oils. Most commercial perfumes are full of petrochemicals and preservatives containing xenoestrogens.
• Use naturally based, non-petroleum based laundry detergents and dish detergents.
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A healthy diet rich in certain foods is also a key way to avoid and combat these estrogenic compounds in our environment. Specific components of these foods help to block uptake and absorption of xenoestrogens as well and cleanse the body of any excess that may be stored. Eating a whole foods based diet, high in plant-based organic foods will help to keep your system clean. Follow a Paleo-style, unprocessed foods diet, like the Fat Burning Kitchen diet will also help you avoid these dangerous chemicals.
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Cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, kale, cauliflower, radishes, turnips, and cabbage are estrogen inhibiting and prevent these artificial hormones from being absorbed into our system. Onions and garlic contain quercetin that is also anti-estrogenic, immune enhancing and detoxifying.
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Omega 3 fats such as those in grass fed meats and wild caught fatty fish are also essential as a safeguard against xenoestrogens. Omega 3 fats have been found to be highly beneficial in estrogen balance and metabolism.
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Other helpful foods included green tea, citrus fruits, organic (full fat) dairy such as grass fed butter and raw grass fed cheeses, raw nuts and seeds, avocados and organic virgin olive oil. Eating organic greens, herbs and organic fruit also adds to the antioxidant potential in the body further protecting and enhancing the body’s natural balance.
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The Environmental Working Group publishes yearly a “Dirty Dozen “list of top endocrine disrupters, and a “Dirty Dozen” list of the produce with the highest pesticides and preservatives. The Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database lists brands that are free of most must-avoid ingredients and Care2 has compiled a list of non-toxic nail polishes. PETA also features a comprehensive index of beauty brands that do not test on animals.
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