Optimal Wellness, Part 2: Hormones and Inflammation

Hormonal imbalances can lead to a host of serious health problems, including inflammation, high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, cancer, dementia and more. Here’s how to get your body back in balance.

Bodies Out of Balance

Most Americans are living out of harmony with their natural biological rhythms, because the small molecules that help keep your body in balance have gone haywire.

These molecules — the hormone-messenger molecules of the endocrine system and the neurotransmitter-messenger molecules of the brain and nervous system — are involved in almost every function of the body, and they are critical to our well-being.

The hormone and neurotransmitter system is yet another one of the body’s core systems we must address in order to prevent disease and power our vitality (see “The 7 Keys to Optimal Wellness“). Understand how and why these systems get out of balance and you will begin to see why so many Americans walk around tired, depressed and overweight. And why no amount of pharmaceutical intervention is going to solve the problem.

All of our hormones and brain-messenger chemicals must work together in a finely orchestrated symphony to keep everything in balance. For example, the hypothalamus and pituitary glands in your brain are the command-and-control centers for all the endocrine (hormone) glands. They send signals to distant parts of the body to control everything from your stress response through your adrenal glands, your blood-sugar balance through your pancreas, your thyroid hormone via your thyroid gland, and your sexual function through your reproductive organs. They also control growth, sleep, mood and much more.

Neurotransmitters, meanwhile, send messages throughout the body to every cell, organ and tissue and help you do everything from moving your arm to feeling happy or sad. So it’s not hard to see why having an appropriate supply of these chemicals is so essential to our well-being.

Indeed, when our hormones become imbalanced, the health consequences can be severe. There are three big epidemics of hormonal problems in America today: too much insulin (from excessive sugar consumption), too much cortisol and adrenaline (from excessive stress), and not enough thyroid hormone (or impaired thyroid function due to things like fluoride in the water supply, gluten sensitivity and chemical exposures such petrochemicals, PCBs, pesticides, and mercury). These all interconnect with and affect the other major category of hormones — our sex hormones.

Imbalances or disturbances in any one of these interconnected systems can influence the way our brains function and lead to everything from depression and dementia to anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). They also are linked to two other major epidemics we currently face: obesity and inflammation.

Our Hunter-Gatherer Past

More than 100 million Americans suffer from insulin resistance. That number has grown to epidemic proportions for one simple reason: We have strayed from eating in harmony with our genes.

Historically, as a hunter-gatherer species, people ate the equivalent of only 20 teaspoons of sugar a year (exclusively from fruits, berries, tubers and the like). These days, the average American eats a whopping 158 pounds per year — or about 50 teaspoons a day! There’s absolutely nothing in our genetic makeup that could have prepared our bodies to handle this kind of dramatic change, or many of the other similarly dramatic lifestyle changes to which we’ve been simultaneously exposed.

Think about it: For virtually all of human history, our ancestors had to work to find food and had very limited access to refined foods or excess calories.

But with the appearance of 15,000 low-fat foods (a.k.a. high-sugar, high-calorie foods) on the market over the last 15 to 20 years, and our increasingly sedentary — and stressful — lifestyle, we have essentially abandoned the conditions for which our historically conditioned metabolisms are well suited. And in the process, we’ve created the perfect conditions for an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and brain disorders.

Our bodies normally produce insulin in response to food in our stomach, particularly sugar. And, since our genetic structure evolved at a time when sugar was rarely consumed, our insulin response is designed to handle vastly lower levels of sugar than what we eat today.

Our bodies respond to our new diet of low-fat, highly processed and refined foods the only way they know how: They keep pumping out insulin — which, in excess, happens to function as a pro-inflammatory substance.

Eventually, we become resistant to all this excess insulin in our blood, just as we would become resistant to a drug. The body needs more and more of it to do the same job it once did with far less. So our insulin-production system spirals out of control, pumping ever more into our bodies, which become inflamed and metabolically imbalanced.

That’s bad, but it gets worse: Remember, hormones are message carriers. And what is all this insulin saying to the rest of our body? It’s rushing through our bloodstreams spreading the message that we are starving. The result: We start craving foods with high sugar content — the very same foods that caused the problem in the first place.

This Is Your Body on Insulin

Perhaps the situation wouldn’t be so bad if insulin metabolized only sugar. We once thought that was insulin’s only role — to help sugar enter your cells to be metabolized, transforming the stored energy of the sun (in plant foods) and the oxygen we breathe into the energy we use every day to run our bodies.

But here is what too much insulin really does to your body, your brain and your health:

• Insulin is a major switching station, or control hormone, for many processes. It dictates how much fat the body will store.
• As long as your insulin levels are high, you will fight a losing battle with weight loss. It acts on your brain to increase appetite — specifically, an appetite for sugar and refined carbohydrates.
• Insulin increases inflammation and oxidative stress and ages your brain, leading to what is being called type 3 diabetes — also known as Alzheimer’s.
• Insulin increases LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, lowers HDL (“good”) cholesterol, raises triglycerides and increases your blood pressure. Insulin resistance causes 50 percent of all reported cases of high blood pressure.
• Insulin stimulates the growth of cancer cells.
• Insulin leads to mood and behavior disturbances such as depression, panic attacks, anxiety, insomnia and ADHD.
• Insulin makes your blood sticky and more likely to clot, leading to heart attacks and strokes.
• Insulin causes sex-hormone problems and can lead to infertility, facial hair growth, acne and scalp hair loss in women; in men, it can cause low testosterone, breast growth and more.

Rebalancing Act

The good news is that balancing blood sugar and correcting insulin resistance is well within our reach, and the effects are dramatic: Diseases ranging from depression to dementia can be stopped and even reversed if intervention occurs early enough.

While there are some new medications that can help, such as Glucophage, Avandia and Actos, they have side effects and are only a band-aid approach to chronic conditions unless used with a comprehensive program that includes nutrition, exercise and stress-management which combine to help balance your neuro-endocrine system by helping it work the way it was designed.

Here is what to do to rebalance insulin, both nutritionally and through your lifestyle:

• Eat whole, real foods, mostly from plant-based sources. Our bodies evolved and were designed to flourish on fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, seeds, whole grains, and lean animal protein such as fish, chicken and eggs.
• Remove toxic foods from your diet. Toxic foods, such as trans fats, high-fructose corn syrup, and all processed foods with ingredients you don’t easily recognize, interfere with your metabolism and create blood-sugar imbalances.
• Eat organic. Pesticides, antibiotics and hormones interfere with your metabolism, detox pathways and many other systems.
• Avoid sugar and flour products. They slow your metabolism and contribute to inflammation.
• Eat early and try to eat protein with each meal. Starting off the day with protein — nuts or nut butters, eggs, a protein shake, or even leftovers from the night before — jump-starts your metabolism and helps to avert overeating throughout the day.
• Eat frequently. Fueling your body regularly throughout the day speeds up your metabolism. Make it a priority to have three meals and a couple of snacks every day. If you’re experiencing blood sugar issues you should try to eat something every 3 to 4 hours to avoid blood sugar swings.
• Finish eating at least two hours before bed. If you fall asleep with food in your stomach, your body is more likely to store it, not burn it.
• Sleep seven to eight hours a night. A lack of sleep generates increased levels of ghrelin, the hunger hormone that triggers you to crave and eat more refined carbs and sugar. Sleep deprivation can also reduce reduce insulin sensitivity by as much as 16-30 percent.¹
• Build and maintain muscle. Your biggest metabolic engine is your muscle mass — basically, this is where your metabolism lives — so use it or lose it. Working with weights, exercise bands and resistance machines, and doing yoga all prevent your muscles from wasting away.
• Exercise intelligently. Try including interval training into your exercise program two or three days a week: Exercise at 90 to 95 percent of your peak heart rate for 30 to 60 seconds, then three to five minutes at 60 to 65 percent of your peak heart rate, alternating for a total of 30 minutes. Exercising at this intensity will trigger a metabolic effect that will cause you to burn more calories all day and while you sleep.
• Deeply relax daily. Stress hormones such as cortisol increase blood sugar, amplify appetite and cause weight gain around the middle, all of which promote insulin resistance. Find some time each day to sit quietly, breathe deeply or meditate.

Try this plan and see how it works for you. The goal is to make your metabolism more efficient — to make your cells more intelligent and cooperative, not resistant. As a result, you’ll need much less insulin to accomplish the task of balancing your blood sugar. Best of all, once you correct your insulin levels, you may find that many related, inflammation-based health problems and hormonal imbalances subside.

Experience this, and you’ll be experiencing functional medicine in action: It’s really about harnessing the power you have to reset your metabolism and restore your body’s natural balance simply by stopping the things that knock you off kilter. And by doing the simple things that empower you to thrive.

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Read the next article in this series Optimal Wellness Part 3 :: Digestive Health

¹ Ann Intern Med. 16 October 2012;157(8):549-557