A few of my patients are experiencing the roller coaster symptoms of menopause.  This can be a particularly frustrating experience for many since the available support is so poor.  This is due in large part because so few doctors even understand what the real issues underlying menopause are.

Last Friday I attended a seminar reviewing the basic cause behind the symptoms commonly found in menopause.  Specifically:

Hot flashes          Hair loss/ thinning
Depression         Vaginal dryness
Weight gain        Pain & inflammation
Poor memory      Brain fog
Energy loss        Change in skin tone

As well as the increase risk of:

Osteoporosis        Dementia
Stroke                    Heart disease
Alzheimer's            Arthritis
Autoimmune disease

The seminar began with a chart showing the average health of women over their life span.  It showed a gently declining line through the first 25 to 50 years followed by a sharp drop in health when menopause begins and continuing to drop like a rock from that point onward.  Menopause is serious stuff.

A brief word on the basics - what causes menopause?  Simply put, when a woman runs out of eggs she goes into menopause.  The total number of egg cells you have is present at the time you are born.  You do not make anymore.  Each month a few of them are selected by the ovaries to mature into full size eggs and one (usually) of them is released at mid-cycle and sent down into the uterus ready to be fertilized and form a baby.  When you run out of eggs you can no longer make the hormones that cause your monthly cycle.  Literally menopause means "the cessation of monthly cycles."

The symptoms of menopause are triggered by the sudden drop in the production of the hormones estrogen and progesterone.  In a super healthy woman this hormone production is taken over by the adrenal glands.  This is one of the main breakdown points in the average American female.  The adrenals can only do this properly if they are very healthy - which almost nobody has anymore.  Our adrenals are beat up by the lifestyle choices we make.  The worst offenders are:

Blood sugar imbalance from eating too many carbs and sugars
Food intolerances from eating gut inflaming foods that unbalance the gut flora
Eating toxic foods and drinking toxic liquids (most store bought food)
Emotional and mental stress from high pressure lifestyle
Unbalanced essential fatty acids (too many seed oils/fried foods)
Insufficient deep restful sleep
Eating too much and not exercising enough

In short, the modern American lifestyle destroys our adrenal glands, and when it comes time for them to take over the sex hormone production they just can't handle it.  (I say our, because men also have a similar process to menopause called andropause, with similar issues - just different hormones.)  When estrogen production jumps around (due to erratic adrenal response) it triggers the ever-popular symptom, the hot flash.  The specific nutrients that are good for this are Estrovite and Opticrine for normalizing the communication between the hypothalamus and pituitary (brain control glands) and the adrenal gland.

The sudden drop in estrogen also triggers the other big breakdown point in menopause.  When estrogen drops, it triggers an inflammatory cytokine response.  Cytokines are the chemicals in our bodies that are responsible for most of the pain and inflammation.  Worst of all, once this cytokine reaction begins it feeds itself and keeps getting worse.  Giving a woman estrogen in pill or patch form will slow this process down about 20%, hence the feeling improvement estrogen therapy seems to have.  But most of the process keeps on going tearing down your health. 

Any place in your body that already had a problem with inflammation will get much worse when your estrogen levels drop and a system wide cytokine reaction is started.  It attacks your bones and can cause osteoporosis.  It can attack your brain and cause depression, mood swings, anxiety, brain fog, dizziness, and eventually Alzheimer's or dementia.  It can attack your circulation and produce strokes, heart disease, cold hands and feet, fungal overgrowth in nail beds, hardening of the arteries, varicose veins, and most any other circulatory problem.  It can attack you gut causing poor digestion, reflux, bloating, constipation, food sensitivities, and so on.  These are all signs of inflammation.  It can attack anywhere in your body.

The processes of inflammation are incredibly complex, and the nitty gritty details of this is what most of the seminar was about.  You likely don't need to know all that detail stuff but are more concerned about what can be done to stop this inflammation cycle and tame the symptoms of menopause.

Number one is to improve your adrenal glands by removing the stress on them that is overloading them and causing them to fail.  That means getting your lifestyle patterns under control.  Adrenal problems are usually problems of excess.  We need to reduce and simplify.  We try to do too much, eat too much, stress too much, and generally burn ourselves out too much.  To maintain this pace we don't take the time to prepare healthy food, so we eat toxic fast and simple foods that can sit on the shelf ready for whenever we need them.  Fresh food is a thing of the past.  We have to get it in big bold letters CONVIENCE EQUALS POISON.

Taming the inflammation cycle is a little more individualized depending on where it is hitting your system specifically.  Different herbs, nutriceuticals, vitamins, and foods are helpful for each attack site.

But there are some specific steps that are important for everyone to calm down the system wide inflammatory cytokine attack. 

Vitamin D with fish oils
Glutathione Recycler
Nitric Oxide Balance

Vitamin D is actually a very powerful hormone that regulates the immune system, and fish oils provide the body with Omega 3 oils that decreases inflammation.

Glutathione is our body's primary antioxidant.  Most of the plant sources of antioxidants are actually used by our body to help restore its own glutathione levels.  Eating lots of high antioxidant foods helps with inflammation.  Glutathione Recycler contains the specific nutrients our body needs to build glutathione.

Nitric oxide powerfully controls our circulation.  It comes in different forms - some bad and some good.  It also directly regulates certain inflammation pathways.  Nitric Balance is the only nutriceutical yet developed that increases only the good forms of nitric oxide while also decreasing the bad forms.

These three items are the specific nutrients that will support everybody entering menopause.  Beyond that your particular symptoms will guide what other nutrient interventions will be helpful in your case.

For Adrenal issues I first do corrections for blood sugar imbalances to "turn the circuits back on".  Once done we use a specific blood sugar control diet for 6 to 8 weeks to rebuild the system and to determine just what carbohydrate tolerance the person has.  To support the adrenals directly I use adaptogenic herbs to improve the response of my cells to my own hormones and neurotransmitters - Adaptocrine.  And I also use Adrenacalm - a skin cream that puts a special nutrient into the blood stream that protects and supports the part of the brain that is for calming down the adrenals.  This is the same part of the brain that controls our short-term memory, which gets destroyed when our adrenals put out too much cortisol in response to stress.

That about sums up the state of the art in managing menopause naturally.  Some people ask me about the medical use of bio-identical hormones for menopause.  To this I say "FOR SHORT TERM USE ONLY!!!" .  Any time you give your body an external hormone it down-regulates the receptor sites for that hormone.  What that means in real people speak is that it has a positive effect for a few weeks to a couple months, then the effect wears off and it actually starts to do harm.  Outside hormones shut down your system in many many ways.  They mess up the regulation and communication pathways between your master gland - the pituitary - and the rest of your body.  Your hormone system is super complex and every part affects every other part.  Adding in an extra hormone load disturbs the balance of all the rest.  Some people's systems are strong enough to adapt to this extra load while others crash within a few months.

So - yes there are some real and powerful things that can be done for the insanity of menopause.  Some of these things are simple in that they involve taking a few supplements every day.  Other parts are harder because the involve recognizing that once your estrogen levels drop you have to reduce the physical and environmental stress on your system - your eating and your lifestyle have to change if you want to avoid the consequences of the systemic inflammation on your body.

Menopause is called the "change of life" for good reason.  It is your body's call for some significant changes in your life.  In retrospect these changes will be seen as for the good.  But in the short term our ego likes doing what it has always done.  But we are different now - the old ways don't work for us anymore.  It's time for a change.          
  

 

Good Journey,
David     
   

 

 

Dr. Dave

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Health Challenge # 1:  Replace your seed oils with healthier fats and oils like Olive Oil, Coconut Oil, Butter, Avocado Oil, Macadamia Nut Oil, or Almond Oil.

     This health poison is a more recently added hazard to our health - seed oils.  Through out human history we have eaten animal fat, butter, and the oils from palm, olive, and coconut.  This has been going on for thousands and thousands of years and has promoted excellent health.  Our country was not well suited to growing the tropical oils so we had to make do with lard and butter from cows.  But as our population grew we needed new concentrated fat sources. We didn't like being dependent on foreign sources for our food oil so we invented the mass production of seed oils - corn, soy, sunflower, safflower, canola, etc.  Unfortunately our bodies are not designed to handle the omega 6 chemical structure of these oils except in small quantities.  Our hormones, brain, nerves, and cell walls are made of an even mix of omega 6 and omega 3 oils - the mix found naturally in vegetables and grasses.  Seeds and grains contain mostly omega 6 oils which "burn too hot" for our systems.  They are designed to be burned by creatures like birds that have a much higher metabolism than we have.  Consequently it causes inflammation in us.  Inflammation is the basis of most disease.

     The second problem with seed oils is that any time you heat these oils they go rancid - which is very poisonous.  And if you cook any starch or protein in seed oil, it causes the formation of trans-fats, another poison.  (Any bag of potato chips that says it is trans-fat free is lying because the cooking of a potato in oil creates trans-fats).  Trans-fats are a serious problem for the basic structure of the body.  Your body uses fats to make the cell walls of all the cells in your body as well as manufacture hormones.  Trans-fats look like normal fats except that they are bent funny.  Your body tries to use these bent fats to make walls and hormones but the end result does not work right.  Imagine you were putting a new shingle roof on your house and half the load of shingles they delivered to you were bent 90 degrees in the middle.  Your roof would be full of holes because the shingles could not lay down flat.  This same thing happens with your cells.  Their outer walls end up leaky if there are trans-fats being used. Could our body handle this toxin once or twice a year...fairly easily.  Can it handle a daily barrage of toxic seed oils and trans-fats - no way.
 
     So health rule number one: don't eat seed oils.  Don't eat things made from seed oils like margarine or shortening (the way these become solid is by adding hydrogen the liquid oils which turns half of them into trans-fats).  Don't cook in seed oils (that means nothing fried in oil).  Don't cook with seed oils (use coconut or olive).  Small amounts, cold pressed, used on salads (as salad dressings)  are ok if they are balanced with sufficient omega 3 oils from fresh cold water fish and similar sources.

 

     If you missed any of the previous health challenges -

 

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Is swimming pool chlorine fueling the allergy epidemic?

     Have you ever gotten into a swimming pool and found it hard to breathe because of the chlorine vapors coming from the pool water?  I know it irritates my eyes quite a bit but I had not thought about the damage the chlorine causes to the lung tissue and sinuses.  This study shows that kids that get a lot of pool time in have 3 to almost 7 times the likelihood of developing respiratory allergies.  The same would be even more true for hot tubs and spas because of the higher temperature and bubbling action would throw even more chlorine into the air that is breathed.

 

Chlorine

 

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~ Thomas J. Peters

~ Earl Nightingale

 

"My richness consists not in the extent of my possessions; but in the fewness of my wants."

J. Brotherton

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About Dr. DeLapp

Dr. DeLapp has been a philosopher, non-force Chiropractor, medical intuitive, and health innovator for over 30 years.  He began experimenting with  medical intuition in 1972 while studying physics at UC Davis.  In addition to physics he designed and completed an individual major in the philosophy and psychology of education.  Shortly after he choose to pursue a career in the only truly health oriented profession available at that time, Chiropractic.  He graduated with honors in 1981 with his doctorate and opened a private practice. 
Since that time he has continued his research into the effects of consciousness and learning on health. 
He developed the Biomagnetic Retraining system for correcting movement abnormalities. 
Since 1991 he has focused on developing a powerful system for uncovering and assisting the mind-body connection in health and personal growth.  The in-depth coaching, guided by the subconscious direction from the body, is called Heartflow and the simpler mind-body retraining for health and unfoldment he has named Gracework.  Both are available at Fair Oaks Health.

Dr David DeLapp DC
Chiropractor

Ellen Flowers FGM
Spiritual Life Coach

 

Vita-Mix