Hormone Balancing: Should You Try It?

Speaker 1 Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus.

Speaker 1 So, a lot of us are feeling pretty drained right now, a bit crappy. Maybe you're not sleeping enough, or you're sleeping too much.

Speaker 1 Well, more and more, we're hearing that one thing could be behind all this, your hormones.

Speaker 1 They're not balanced.

Speaker 7 If you're a man or a woman with messed up hormones, listen up.

Speaker 9 Let's discuss the best way to balance your hormones if you are not getting your hormone levels tested what are you doing

Speaker 1 people are saying that because of stuff like stress and chemicals in our environment our hormones are out of whack and our bodies aren't working the way that they're supposed to so one hormone that might be messed up is your stress hormone cortisol this is something that i wish i knew years ago cortisol it's a real motherfucker here's five signs that you're running on stress hormones and high cortisol and you probably need to make some huge lifestyle changes.

Speaker 11 Are you talking about adrenal fatigue? Yeah.

Speaker 1 You're talking about adrenal fatigue.

Speaker 13 Everybody's talking about adrenal fatigue.

Speaker 14 It goes from high cortisol to then having a cortisol crash and that, my friends, is trouble.

Speaker 1 And it's not just cortisol. Apparently, for a bunch of us, our testosterone is in the toilet and it's making us feel awful.

Speaker 15 Guys, we have an epidemic of low testosterone among men.

Speaker 16 I have felt like absolute shit for the last year.

Speaker 15 Low tea sucks. You don't even feel like a man.
You all depress and shit.

Speaker 1 And you'll also hear that our estrogen is running amok, causing things like painful periods.

Speaker 15 There's a good chance your estrogen levels are higher than they should be.

Speaker 5 You might be estrogen dominant.

Speaker 1 And these wellness gurus, I mean, some of them are even healthcare professionals. Also have advice on how we can fix our hormonal imbalance.

Speaker 1 They'll recommend supplements, special diets, exercise regimes, or even just direct injections of the hormone that you're missing out on. And all over the internet, people swear by these techniques.

Speaker 1 They say they've used them and they feel great.

Speaker 13 Oh my God, this has changed my life.

Speaker 7 Feel amazing.

Speaker 15 The way that it's made my energy, the way it's made me mentally far more clear has been fing incredible.

Speaker 11 Probably one of the best things I've ever done for my health.

Speaker 13 Four-month therapy has definitely like changed my life.

Speaker 1 So if you are feeling not your best self and you want to get a little pep in your step, can you fix it by balancing your hormones? And also, what are the risks here?

Speaker 1 When it comes to hormones, there's a lot of...

Speaker 9 What are you doing?

Speaker 1 But then, there's science.

Speaker 1 Science versus balancing your hormones is coming up just after the break.

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Speaker 1 Welcome back. Today on the show, we are finding out if we need to be hacking our hormones.
Senior producer Rose Rimmler has been hacking away at the science. Yeah.
Rose, how are you feeling?

Speaker 13 Wow, there's just so much out there.

Speaker 5 There truly is. Do you just dip your toes toes into the hormone balancing world and it's like, whoa.

Speaker 13 And it's a whirlpool. It can suck you right in, toe first.

Speaker 1 Yes. Okay.

Speaker 1 So what I want to start by asking you is about cortisol because you go online and people will say that having too much cortisol can lead to a bunch of stuff that I may or may not be feeling right now.

Speaker 5 Not sleeping properly, feeling anxious.

Speaker 1 Oh, no. So

Speaker 1 do we need to be worrying about cortisol?

Speaker 13 So, cortisol is this hormone that our adrenal glands make.

Speaker 13 And they make it when we're under some kind of stress. But we also make it routinely throughout the day and especially in the morning.
So we make it within the first half hour or so of waking up.

Speaker 13 And that helps us just like, you know, jump out of bed with our fresh lease on life, which I know, Wendy, is what you do every morning, I assume.

Speaker 10 God remember the last time I bound out of bed.

Speaker 13 Well, it does help you wake up. And then it goes down throughout the course of the day.
So it's good. It's a good thing.
But having a lot of cortisol in your system is not a good thing.

Speaker 13 And I came across a particular story that really drove this home for me. I heard it from Dr.
Dina Adamoulam. She's an endocrinologist, so a hormone doctor.

Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 13 What happened? So for Dina, this all started when this patient walked through her door.

Speaker 13 Do you remember the moment you first met her?

Speaker 21 I do. I had never seen her before.
So sometimes I always ask my patient, can I see your driver's license?

Speaker 21 Because that gives me a good indication of what they might have looked like within the past five to 10 years. And it was clearly a drastic difference from what I could see.

Speaker 13 What Dina saw was that this woman's face had gotten a lot rounder and it was very red and had more acne than usual, that she had gained a lot of weight, but it was primarily in her stomach and she had lost hair.

Speaker 13 She had all these terrible bruises. And overall, she told Dina that she just felt terrible.

Speaker 13 And Dina wanted to know what was going on with her hormones. So she does a bunch of tests.

Speaker 21 When we did her blood work, I found that she clearly did have very high levels of cortisol. Her cortisol was more than five times the upper limit of normal.
Five times.

Speaker 13 Five times.

Speaker 3 Whoa.

Speaker 13 Yeah, it looked like the patient had Cushing syndrome, which means that the body is just flooded with cortisol.

Speaker 13 And Dina immediately starts trying to work out like what could be causing this in this person.

Speaker 13 And she thinks thinks maybe she has a tumor that's causing her body to pump out too much cortisol.

Speaker 21 I've seen maybe three or four cases in my entire career. And when you see these patients, it's devastating.
They look like how this patient was looking in front of me.

Speaker 13 This gets Dina really worried because these patients, they don't always get better.

Speaker 21 Sometimes I can't help them. I've had patients of mine die from cushings.

Speaker 13 But before Dina sent her off to get a bunch of scans and tests and to look for a tumor, she asked her one more question.

Speaker 21 Is there any supplements that you're taking? Is there any, you know, vitamins that you're taking? Is there anything that you're, that you haven't been prescribed by a doctor?

Speaker 13 And here's where Dina realizes what's causing all this. What does she say to you?

Speaker 21 She told me that she was taking a supplement.

Speaker 12 Oh.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 This woman had gone online and seen all this stuff about how boosting your cortisol can improve your energy.

Speaker 13 And so she took took a supplement that promised to do that. And by the time she's seen Dina, she'd been taking it for months.

Speaker 13 And so when Dina heard that, weirdly, it actually was kind of a relief.

Speaker 21 As soon as she said that, that was a kind of like an aha moment. Like, thank God, I don't think this person has an adrenal tumor and I have a path forward for this person to get better.

Speaker 5 So what the hell?

Speaker 5 was in the supplement?

Speaker 13 Because I just assume all this garbage people sell online like does does nothing but i know i assume that too i assume it's like m m's or something yeah well dina didn't remember the name of the supplement she wasn't sure exactly what was in it but she remembers that it claimed to have a bunch of science-y sounding stuff like adaptogens in it

Speaker 13 maybe they actually did something but there's a much simpler explanation here which is that It's possible this supplement was spiked with the pharmaceutical version of cortisol. Oh.

Speaker 13 Like a corticosteroid, like synthetic cortisol that like a Western medicine. Yes, and the reason I say that is because, like, studies have found this before.

Speaker 13 There was actually a study that analyzed 12 different adrenal support supplements. So, these are marketed to exactly the kind of person like Dina's patient who was feeling low energy, right?

Speaker 1 Right. All natural, probably saying things like that.

Speaker 3 All natural.

Speaker 19 Um, uh-huh.

Speaker 1 So, how many of them had actual drugs in them?

Speaker 13 All of them had pharmaceutical stuff. Most of them had at at least one steroid hormone.

Speaker 6 At least one.

Speaker 13 So this is very possible that that's what happened.

Speaker 13 And you know, there are other case reports of people who have taken supposedly all natural supplements that ended up getting this like jacked up cortisol level thing happening to them and getting bad symptoms.

Speaker 16 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 Oh my gosh. Okay.
So then with Dina's patient, like what happened? Please tell me she stops taking it.

Speaker 13 So she stopped taking the supplement and she got better. She did get better.

Speaker 21 But it took a long time for her body to recover and change to go back to normal.

Speaker 21 I would say that took like more than six months to a year for her to start losing some of the weight, for her to feel like herself again.

Speaker 21 So it was really, a really significant hit on her body in just so many ways.

Speaker 19 Oh,

Speaker 1 oh, okay. So what we have learned is

Speaker 17 like really beware of those supplements that are saying things like all natural because,

Speaker 1 you know, you're really not helping with your cortisol imbalance, right?

Speaker 13 Well, I'd take it a step further because the thing is that this woman probably never had a cortisol imbalance until she gave herself one accidentally by taking these freaking supplements.

Speaker 13 And that's because having an actual medical problem where you naturally have too much or too little cortisol is rare.

Speaker 13 So, like, when it comes to cushings, where your body starts pumping out too much cortisol, each year out of a million people, less than 10 people get diagnosed with this.

Speaker 10 Oh, wow. That is quite rare.

Speaker 1 Okay, so that's having too much cortisol, but then what about having too little? Like there's that thing online about adrenal fatigue.

Speaker 13 Right.

Speaker 13 So the idea there that you hear people talk about online is that what happens here is that you're under so much stress that your adrenal glands are constantly pumping out cortisol and then they burn out.

Speaker 13 They just like you've overused them and they fail.

Speaker 13 But the thing is that there's just no evidence evidence for this.

Speaker 3 Oh.

Speaker 13 According to this big review paper that went through all these papers that were on supposed adrenal fatigue.

Speaker 20 Right, right, right, right.

Speaker 13 Well, they ultimately concluded, I mean, it's in the title of the paper. It's called Adrenal Fatigue Does Not Exist.

Speaker 2 Oh, wow.

Speaker 17 Wow. That's a strong,

Speaker 11 strong statement.

Speaker 5 I read a lot of scientific papers that don't come out so strong.

Speaker 13 And also, annoyingly, like, this doesn't mean that there is no possibility someone could have a problem with low cortisol. That's a disease that exists.

Speaker 13 It's actually called adrenal insufficiency, right? So that sounds very similar.

Speaker 11 To adrenal fatigue, yes.

Speaker 5 Yes, it does.

Speaker 13 But the thing with adrenal insufficiency is it's a very serious disease and it's not just about feeling tired and crummy. We're talking extreme chronic fatigue.

Speaker 13 And Dina says, you need to treat it or it can be fatal.

Speaker 21 It's really, really hard. for them.
It requires medical intervention. You can't just have adrenal insufficiency and go on with your life without having some kind of medical medical help.

Speaker 1 Okay, so if you don't have a medical condition involving cortisol, there's really no need to worry.

Speaker 13 I mean, no, because your cortisol levels are supposed to go up and down throughout the day. And it's supposed to go up if there's like a stressor because it'll help you get through that stressor.

Speaker 13 Like you want that stuff to happen. People who don't have these specific conditions, the body will balance it out naturally.

Speaker 13 Like that is what the brain is for, basically, to like say like more or less cortisol, please. Right.

Speaker 13 But I will say it's true that chronic stress is bad for you and chronic stress is associated with having higher cortisol.

Speaker 13 But even then, if you are someone who feels like you're under chronic stress, I spoke about this with Dr. Ann Coppola.
She's another endocrinologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Speaker 13 She says that even then focusing on the cortisol is the wrong way to think about it.

Speaker 23 I'm not the believer that we need to do something if we're feeling stressed to try to bring our cortisol levels down.

Speaker 13 Why not? It seems like it's a good idea. They need to come down.

Speaker 23 Why not tackle the root problem? The stress, not the response, right? So try to manage your stress.

Speaker 1 That makes more sense. That makes sense.
You know, if stress is causing this like elevated cortisol, you got to handle the stress, not the cortisol. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's like if you have a housemate that's never replacing the toilet paper, the answer isn't hide the toilet paper in your room.

Speaker 11 You know, you've got to, you've got to talk to your housemate about the problem.

Speaker 1 Is that right?

Speaker 13 Uh, yeah, that's suspiciously specific.

Speaker 19 Um,

Speaker 12 he used so

Speaker 6 much toilet paper rose.

Speaker 3 It was crazy.

Speaker 13 Anne actually had an analogy that's kind of like that.

Speaker 23 You know, you don't want to give perfume when you really need a bath.

Speaker 1 Better analogy. Yeah,

Speaker 13 but guys both really brought your A-game.

Speaker 13 And Aunt says: if you really feel crappy and run down, you deserve to have a doctor take you seriously and try to figure out what's wrong.

Speaker 13 But just don't expect a diagnosis of adrenal fatigue.

Speaker 1 Okay, so here's where we're at. When it comes to balancing your hormones for stress,

Speaker 5 the answer is don't do it unless you have a medical condition that you need medicine for.

Speaker 1 Do not try to balance your cortisol levels.

Speaker 13 Don't DIY endocrinology.

Speaker 5 And if you are really stressed out,

Speaker 4 try

Speaker 11 to focus on that.

Speaker 1 Although I know, I know how hard, how hard that can be.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 13 So let's move on. We're going to take a break.

Speaker 13 When we come back, we're going to find out if we're really in a testosterone crisis. Coming up.

Speaker 1 Welcome back to the show. Today we are talking about hacking your hormones.
Do you need to do it?

Speaker 11 How do you do it?

Speaker 1 Rose Rimla is here, our guide into this hormone balancing world.

Speaker 1 Where are you taking me next?

Speaker 13 Wendy, I'm taking you to your favorite place, the ball sack.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 what are we going to do while we're here? It's a strange place.

Speaker 5 Look around you.

Speaker 13 This is where testosterone is made

Speaker 13 in people with testicles. And it's made in other parts of the body too.
Okay. Especially people without testicles.
But let's just get down to brass tacks. We're here to talk about testosterone.
Right.

Speaker 6 Okay.

Speaker 13 And what people on the internet are saying about it.

Speaker 1 So what are people on the internet saying about testosterone?

Speaker 13 They are saying that testosterone levels in men generally across the board are plummeting. This is why a lot of men just feel crappy, don't have a lot of energy, don't feel like their best selves.

Speaker 13 And that the solution is to take some extra tea.

Speaker 10 Mmm, okay.

Speaker 13 And you hear this a lot on social media from wellness influencers. Of course, of course.
Which sounds like it's a very new thing, but it's really not new.

Speaker 13 And men have actually been trying to boost their testosterone for ages. And I talked about this with Mohit Kara.
He's a doctor and professor of urology at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas.

Speaker 24 It goes way back, even 2000 BC.

Speaker 24 Ancient manuscripts talk about the ingestion of testicular tissue.

Speaker 11 But they would eat it. They would eat it.

Speaker 5 Wait, whose testicular tissue were they eating?

Speaker 2 Goat, dog, pig, hippos?

Speaker 6 Hippos?

Speaker 13 Kind of, you name it.

Speaker 2 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 5 How big is a hippo's bowl?

Speaker 1 Something I didn't think I'd say today.

Speaker 13 I don't know. That sounds like a riddle.

Speaker 13 And a lot of the motivation for eating hippo balls or whatever has come down to this idea that more testosterone means being more vital, more alive.

Speaker 13 Like there was this doctor in the 1920s who believed that he had boosted his patients' testosterone.

Speaker 13 And he wrote that his patients, quote, changed from feeble, parched, dribbling drones to men of vigorous bloom who threw away their glasses, shaved twice a day, dragged loads up to 220 pounds,

Speaker 13 and even indulged in such youthful follies as buying land in Florida.

Speaker 13 I don't know what that means.

Speaker 20 That seems like a dig at Florida, which kind of comes out of left field.

Speaker 13 But away from hippos balls, Florida real estate.

Speaker 13 No. We do know testosterone is very important for your health.
And it's important for men to have enough testosterone. Because if

Speaker 13 they don't have enough testosterone, they can feel pretty crappy. So here's Mohit.

Speaker 24 Low energy, low libido, erectile dysfunction, decreased muscle mass, increased fat deposition, poor sleep, poor cognition, and some depression as well.

Speaker 1 Wow, that's a long list. You got muscle issues, brain issues.
You want...

Speaker 1 You want enough testosterone.

Speaker 12 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So then the question becomes, how many men out there don't have enough? Like, are we truly in a testosterone crisis?

Speaker 13 Very interestingly, there is evidence that testosterone levels are going down over time.

Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 13 So for example, there is a study that came out fairly recently that looked at testosterone levels in 1999 in guys aged 15 to 39. This is in the U.S.

Speaker 10 So you pluck out like, what, Ryan Philippe or whatever.

Speaker 1 Take him out of his cruel intentions set,

Speaker 11 test his testosterone.

Speaker 13 Okay. And then tested guys of that age range in 2015

Speaker 13 and found that the younger generation really did have lower levels of testosterone than the older generation. So it was somewhere in the ballpark of 25% less on average.

Speaker 1 Sorry, I was so impressed by your ballpark pun that I missed it.

Speaker 11 What was it?

Speaker 13 Not intentional. Not

Speaker 3 cruel intentional.

Speaker 13 Not cruel intentional.

Speaker 5 Wait, so, but seriously, how much lower?

Speaker 13 About 25% less.

Speaker 1 25%.

Speaker 10 That doesn't sound good.

Speaker 13 And other studies have also shown testosterone declines over time, too, by different amounts and in different populations.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 13 We don't totally know why this is happening.

Speaker 13 I mean, one big theory is that it's related to chemicals in our environment, like endocrine disruptors, because we know that those can mess with our hormones.

Speaker 13 But we also know that this is linked to obesity. And that's partly because fat cells make an enzyme called aromatase, which I talked about with Mohit.

Speaker 24 You know what aromatase does? It eats testosterone. It just eats it up and converts it into estrogen, right? It's constantly eating up whatever I'm making, the testicles are making, it's eating it up.

Speaker 13 And we do see that men who lose weight bring their testosterone levels back up. Aha.

Speaker 1 Okay. Interesting.
All right. So this is,

Speaker 1 there is something weird going on here. So how worried do you think we need to be?

Speaker 13 I mean, this is not a good thing. It's like not a sign that our population is in the best of health.
But I think it's a stretch to really freak out about this.

Speaker 13 Like when we look at men who have low levels of testosterone and some of the symptoms that Mohit mentioned, so stuff like low libido, bad sleep, low energy.

Speaker 13 The best estimate that we have suggests it's only about 6% of the male population that have like low TIBA symptoms.

Speaker 1 6%.

Speaker 13 Yeah, it's not everybody.

Speaker 1 That number gets a bit higher as you get older, but I mean, good news: the majority of men don't need to be worried about this.

Speaker 13 Right. And it seems like a lot more men are worried about this than need to be.

Speaker 13 So, I'm thinking of this clinical trial that reported that they had to turn away 85% of the guys who showed up to be in the study thinking they had low T because of these symptoms, because when they actually got tested, their testosterone levels were fine.

Speaker 1 So, if you are

Speaker 16 in

Speaker 1 the minority that does actually have low T and has symptoms,

Speaker 1 will you feel better by topping it up? You know, a cheeky shot of T in the arm.

Speaker 13 Shot, gel, pellet.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes. So should you do it?

Speaker 13 I mean, yeah, for some people, it really might help them. So we have these studies that are collectively called the T trials, where they recruited nearly 800 people with low T.

Speaker 13 So these were older guys.

Speaker 13 They had symptoms and gave them testosterone or placebo. And statistically, they did see an improvement in guys' moods.

Speaker 13 And in people with depression, there was an improvement in their depression symptoms. Right.

Speaker 13 And we have a newer and bigger study that found the same thing, a bit of an improvement for people with depression.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's cool.

Speaker 12 That's really cool. Yeah.

Speaker 13 But I think a lot of guys might expect that they would get a much bigger benefit here.

Speaker 13 None of these studies were showing that guys were just like jumping out of their beds like Grandpa Joe and Charlie in the chocolate factory.

Speaker 13 Moit says that rarely happens.

Speaker 24 Not exactly. I mean, and some patients will feel an improvement in energy.
There are some men that come back and say, wow, this was a big difference. And I do see that.

Speaker 24 But most men will say this really helps and it's good.

Speaker 24 But I just don't want the listeners out there to think, I just take testosterone and the world's going to be great.

Speaker 13 In fact, Mohit says that testosterone is so far off from being... a golden ticket, you know, being the best you

Speaker 13 that even for patients who are getting testosterone therapy, he tells them that to really be healthy and feel really good, they also have to do all the other regular ass stuff.

Speaker 24 Rose, I don't have a pill on the planet stronger than diet, exercise, sleep, and stress reduction.

Speaker 24 In other words, many patients will come in and say, look, I'm going to take the testosterone and I'm going to keep eating potato chips and watching TV, and I want everything to be great.

Speaker 24 I said, that's not going to work.

Speaker 13 And of course, a lot of guys are taking this because of their sex drive. And we know that if you've got low T, getting a bump might bump up your libido.

Speaker 13 But if you're in the normal testosterone range, it's just like jacking yourself up with more testosterone doesn't seem to work for that.

Speaker 1 Okay, so that is some of the benefits. If you've got a low T,

Speaker 1 taking more might bump up your sex drive, might give you a little mood boost. But if you think you're about to be buying land in Florida, think again.

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 13 Florida is is safe from hordes of testosterone-fueled real estate speculators.

Speaker 5 Okay, so now what about the risks? You know, the stuff that perhaps welders gurus are a little less keen to talk about.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 13 So some good news here is that for a long time, it was thought that taking testosterone could cause heart attacks and prostate cancer. Oh, right.

Speaker 13 But this big new study that Mohit was a part of finds that that's not the case.

Speaker 24 And what we showed in that trial was there was no increased risk in heart attacks. And there was no difference whether they took testosterone or placebo.

Speaker 24 There was no increased risk in prostate cancer.

Speaker 13 And the same is true for trans men taking testosterone. We're not seeing a higher risk of heart attacks or stroke in that population.

Speaker 13 But there are other downsides to testosterone.

Speaker 13 So the big one is that sperm count plummets. And Mohit says a lot of men on T actually don't realize this.

Speaker 24 So it's very unfortunate. I see many of these patients that go to these outside clinics.
They are started on testosterone supplementation. They're young men.

Speaker 24 They were never told that they would become infertile if they took this medication. They show up and they say, I want to have a child.

Speaker 1 Did he say infertile?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 13 When you take testosterone, your brain thinks, oh, my body has enough testosterone. I'm going to make less of it.

Speaker 13 And then you also make less sperm. Oh.
So that's why your sperm count goes low around testosterone.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 13 And that's actually actually why testosterone is being studied as part of a male birth control method, which, which we talked about in an episode that came out a couple of years ago.

Speaker 13 And even though this is reversible, so you go off tea and your sperm count goes back up.

Speaker 6 Oh, great.

Speaker 13 It can take a while to bounce back, like six months to two years. Oh, wow.
And it might not bounce back to where it was before.

Speaker 13 And then the other thing I asked Mohit about, because like personally, I was really curious about this,

Speaker 13 was this idea of like taking tea and getting like really aggressive.

Speaker 13 Because like you've probably heard of Reid rage or getting Reuted out.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that real?

Speaker 13 That's that was my question too.

Speaker 13 I did find an experiment in the literature where scientists gave guys big doses of tea and then followed them for six weeks to see if their mood changed and if they got more aggressive.

Speaker 13 It was interesting because they actually recruited the guys like partners or spouses or like close friends who they hung out with a lot and asked them, like, is this person changing?

Speaker 13 And how are they changing? Oh, wow. And what they found was that basically basically different people responded really differently.

Speaker 13 So there were a couple of guys that said that they felt like they were getting more aggressive for sure.

Speaker 13 And researchers, they actually pulled one guy from the study because his behavior was getting, quote, alarming. But most people's behavior didn't change much at all.

Speaker 13 And this is true for trans men who were on tea as well. Like you see these really mixed results.
But it's very, it's interesting, right?

Speaker 13 Like the same like big dose of testosterone might not affect someone at all and another person get like alarmingly angry yeah you know yeah it's very strange it's kind of unpredictable

Speaker 5 and then just quickly what about tea for women because i i'm starting to see i don't know what this says about my algorithm like there are more and more uh ads and wellness gurus promoting this like should

Speaker 13 should women be taking testosterone You know, there was this international panel that got together and rounded up studies of testosterone and women and looked at what it might be helpful for and what it might not be helpful for.

Speaker 13 And they concluded that the best evidence that we have here is that testosterone could help with low libido in post-menopausal women.

Speaker 1 That's it.

Speaker 13 And that was it.

Speaker 13 And it's worth pointing out that if you're a woman of any age, playing around with tea has some different risks for you than for men because women typically have very low levels of testosterone.

Speaker 13 So bumping it up, you can easily go so high that you cause some changes that are

Speaker 13 actually might really bother you if you identify as as a woman. So, you know, you can permanently deepen your voice, lose hair that's on your head.

Speaker 13 And if you're pregnant, taking testosterone can harm the fetus.

Speaker 12 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 6 Okay.

Speaker 5 All right.

Speaker 1 So I guess the final hormone to hack is estrogen.

Speaker 7 What have you been seeing?

Speaker 13 I've been looking at hormone balancing content for several months now. But yeah, one thing I've noticed is this trend of people demonizing estrogen.

Speaker 13 It's like if you feel tired or moody or weird, bam, it's your estrogen. If there is something off about your menstrual cycle, like bam, estrogen.

Speaker 13 And they say that you need to get it stabilized, usually by taking supplements or eating specific foods at certain times of your cycle.

Speaker 17 So is there any science behind this?

Speaker 13 Now, the truth is that estrogen is related to some menstrual conditions, like fibroids, endometriosis,

Speaker 13 like really bad PMS.

Speaker 13 But a lot of this content suggests that if your period isn't like the perfect, most smooth, painless, predictable experience that's been like coordinated by fairies,

Speaker 13 then your hormones are way off. But that's just like, that's just not, it's just not true.
So, like, take painful periods, for example. Okay.

Speaker 13 So, there are influencers that would have you believe that if you have cramps during your period, it's a sign that you have an excess of estrogen.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 13 And it's like, no, not necessarily. We know that most people who get painful cramps during their periods,

Speaker 13 they make more of a certain type of lipid called prostaglandin. And that's why their cramps are more painful.

Speaker 1 It's more prostaglandin, not estrogen.

Speaker 13 And we've known this for decades. And if I could just rant like a little bit longer.

Speaker 17 Yes, please.

Speaker 13 These influencers are just like taking little bits and pieces of things and just like pasting them together.

Speaker 13 They're like, it makes me think of like a decorator crab, you know, that like they're like, oh, I'll take a little bit of kelp and I'll take a little bit of shell and I'll put it on my my shell and then i'll make a whole new outfit and no one will recognize me like no we get it you're a crab you know so what's an example of like influences putting like weird faux science together and then like turning it into advice they're telling people a good example of this and this is my final debunk of the episode okay um is when i see all these videos of people saying like don't do this kind of exercise or that kind of exercise because it'll affect your hormones in some bad way

Speaker 13 and like I have a friend who's postmenopausal who told me, like, she's been watching a lot of this wellness stuff.

Speaker 13 And she was like, I was thinking I'd get back into running, but then I saw all this stuff online that said postmenopausal women shouldn't run because it'll make them put weight around their belly because of like hormonal reasons.

Speaker 13 Uh-huh, uh-huh. And I'm like,

Speaker 13 Wendy,

Speaker 13 I looked into this and what I have here in my hot little hands, it's actually online, but I have here a 2022 review of aerobic exercise on abdominal fat, which did not find that people's belly fat increased.

Speaker 13 It found the opposite. People lost a little bit of belly fat, including several studies specifically on postmenopausal women.

Speaker 13 So this is stupid.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 13 And if you need to hear it from an expert, I ran this by Ann.

Speaker 23 Yeah, I agree with you.

Speaker 13 That's stupid.

Speaker 23 Yeah, I wouldn't.

Speaker 23 Absolutely. You know, I absolutely think that's stupid.

Speaker 13 And it just really, it's like an instance where it just makes me want to like spritz water on the influencers, like bad influencer, bad influencer.

Speaker 13 Let people go for a run if that's what they want to do. Jeez.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 There's so much with hormones.

Speaker 13 Yeah, there's so much here. But like just in general, for most of us, you can just trust that your hormones.
are trucking along and just helping you out in the world. Here's Anne.

Speaker 23 I think what I would like to convey is that

Speaker 23 you don't need to mess with them. Don't even try to.
They're doing what they're supposed to do.

Speaker 23 And so

Speaker 23 you're just kind of getting in the way.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 No more supplements.

Speaker 18 No more

Speaker 1 hippotesticles.

Speaker 13 Well, I wouldn't say that.

Speaker 13 What you do in your off time is what you do.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 But as a general rule, using all of this, like whatever dietary advice about what to do to balance your hormones and these like exercise advice, like this is all just like let your hormones fluctuate as they're naturally meant to fluctuate.

Speaker 13 Yeah. And actually, I read a review paper that summed this all up really nicely, where they said basically that the pursuit of balancing your hormones is a biological fantasy.

Speaker 3 Oh, wow.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 1 Can't wait for that Disney movie to come out.

Speaker 20 So bottom line, no more trying to balance your hormones through some advice from a sciencey sounding person on TikTok.

Speaker 13 No, don't do it.

Speaker 22 Oh, Rose.

Speaker 6 I can't believe how much research you did for us to ultimately come to that conclusion.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I know, but that it's, that's what you got to do. That's the job, Wendy.

Speaker 20 That is the job. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 6 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1 Okay, so how many citations are in this week's episode?

Speaker 13 79.

Speaker 1 79 citations.

Speaker 5 And if people want to see them in all of their glory, where should they go?

Speaker 13 They can check the link to the transcript of the episode and they can find that link in our show notes.

Speaker 4 Thanks, Rose.

Speaker 13 Thanks, Wendy.

Speaker 20 This episode was produced by Rose Rimmler with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Michelle Dang, and Meryl Horne. We're edited by Blythe Terrell.
Fact-checking by Erika Akiko-Howard.

Speaker 1 Mix and sound design by Bobby Lorde.

Speaker 20 Music written by Bobby Lorde, Bumi Hidaka, and Peter Leonard. Research help from Timmy Broderick.
Recording help from Alex Stuckey.

Speaker 20 Thanks to all of the researchers that we spoke to for this episode, including Dr. Amit Raval, Dr.
Andrea Sandson, Professor Bob Spencer, Dr. Daniel Ripon, Dr.
Emma Adden, Dr. Hannah Truxell, Dr.

Speaker 20 John Hox, Dr. Jonathan Little, Professor Paul Cook, and Professor Paula Hillard.
Special thanks to Joel Werner, the Zuckerman family, and Joseph Lavelle Wilson.

Speaker 20 Science Versus is a Spotify studio's original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
We are on all the podcast apps, so find us there.

Speaker 20 But if you are listening on Spotify, to follow us, just tap the bell icon and then you'll get notifications when new episodes come out. I'm Wendy Zuckerman.

Speaker 13 Back to you next time.