I went to another excellent neuro-endocrinology seminar last Friday.  This one was focused on Andropause - the male menopause.  Yes, men have the same kind of hormonal changes women do when they go through menopause.  The main difference is that in men the change comes on more slowly and can happen at most any age.  Andropause is basically the failure of the body to produce male hormones.

What is the main symptom of andropause?  The main symptom is a general lack of motivation and drive.  These are the guys that look forward to just flopping down on the couch to watch TV or play video games.  Their only drive is to order pizza and beer.  The natural virtues of curiosity and accomplishment are driven by balanced amounts of the male hormone testosterone.  Too much testosterone and you get aggressive competitiveness and demand feelings running the male personality.  Not enough and the guy just does not care about doing much of anything other than what feels good in the moment.

The biggest key to recovery from loss of male hormone according to the doctor teaching the class was the patient having a wife who will take charge and champion the needs of the male patient.  Why?  Because these guys won't do anything you tell them to do.  They refuse to follow a doctor's treatment protocols.  They just don't care.  They don't see that anything is wrong.  They think that it is just fine that they have no joy of living - that just getting by is fine.  This is because the basic alarm and concern about things being wrong requires adequate testosterone - which they don't have.  So if they don't have a wife that will do the caring for both of them and be sure that the treatment protocols are followed, they won't get better on their own.

So what causes testosterone production failure?  While there are many possible causes, the four most common patterns are:

1. Fat cell enzymes turning the testosterone into estrogen (female hormone)
2. Excess hormone binding proteins blocking the testosterone
3. Failure of the testicle cells that produce testosterone
4. Too much conversion of testosterone into DHT causing receptor insensitivity

With each of the four most common patterns, testosterone replacement therapy actually makes the problem worse.  Testosterone replacement is about the only treatment medical science has to offer.  Unfortunately 99% of doctors do not do the level of necessary testing to know what pattern and cause is behind a patient's low testosterone, so replacement therapy is usually used in older males, and the problem in younger males is simply ignored.

The patterns above are mechanisms of dysfunction, but not the actual cause.  The actual cause for all the above is the same: inflammation and insulin resistance. 

Inflammation means the body is producing too many inflammatory chemicals called cytokines.  A healthy body makes these cytokines to fight infections with and to produce swelling, pain, and increased blood flow at a site of injury.  When cytokines are produced by our immune cells in tiny amounts at only specific injury or infection sites they provide a powerful defense and healing force.  But when there is no enemy or injury to fight, these chemicals destroy healthy cells and mess up the functioning of the body all over the place.  Inflammation is good in the right place and at the right time, but in the wrong place and at the wrong time it is disastrous.

Inappropriate inflammation is caused by many things such as toxic chemicals, mold and fungus exposure, chronic stress, allergies and sensitivities, and so on.  But the single biggest cause of inappropriate inflammation is the Standard American Diet (SAD).  Fast food, packaged food, canned food, take-out, and the like are so full of poisons, toxins, and unbalanced macronutrient ratios (too many sugars, carbohydrates, and unsaturated fats) that it is impossible to be healthy eating these foods.  Not only are they directly a cause of overwhelming inflammation, but they produce insulin resistance which also creates inflammation.  (Inflammation also loops back to produce insulin resistance.) 

Insulin resistance means your energy production system is not working.  Insulin is the hormone that shuttles nutrients into the cells.  When the cells stop responding to insulin (resistance) they starve and fail to work properly.  The food your cells need gets dumped into fat cells instead of the nervous, organ, and muscle cells that need it.  The more fat you have, the more fat enzymes  you have - including the enzyme (called aromatase) that turns male hormones into female hormones.   Insulin resistance comes from eating too many sugars and carbohydrates or simply from eating too much food period.  We hear about insulin resistance today mostly because it is the early step leading to diabetes.

Only one thing works to correct the most common causes of male hormone loss - a massive change in the patient's diet.  Various supplements can help with the various imbalances in the body's systems, but none of those supplements will do a thing if the diet is not taken care of first.  The tiny amounts of good nutrients you take as pills or powders to improve things can not begin to overcome the massive amounts of bad nutrients you get from a bad or Standard American Diet.

Interesting: of the top 50 most prescribed drugs in America, 29 of them are to compensate for the effects of our bad diet.  It is diet that causes most of our pain and inflammation, hypertension, high cholesterol, heart disease, stroke, depression, diabetes, reflux, anxiety, some cancers, Alzheimer's, bowel troubles, and so on.  Eating cheap and fast is killing us.  But before it kills us it makes us fat, depressed, and sick so that we can spend most of our life's earnings on drugs and medical help. 

Is that really why you want to spend your life working - just to turn over your life earnings to the pharmacy and some HMO?  1 out of every 3 dollars in America today is spent on health care.  Something is seriously wrong here.

People complain that eating healthy is too expensive and takes too much time.  When you factor in the health care costs of the typical diet, health food is the cheapest health insurance around.  As far as time goes, the extra half hour to one hour a day to prepare good healthy food amounts to maybe 300 hours a year to keep you vital and alive into your 70's, 80's, and 90's as compared to saving those 300 hours by eating fast and cheap and ending up too sick, tired, fat, and depressed to do much of anything past the age of 50.

I am actually being generous with those estimates.  I am seeing more and more very young people showing up with the kind of poor diet and lifestyle diseases that 30 years ago I only saw in people in their 50's and 60's.  50 years ago only about 10% of the population was obese; today that number is more like 50%.  And for men, that fat converts your male testosterone into female estrogen.  And yes, that produces female changes in men like breast enlargement.  Some psychologists have suggested that the increase in female hormones in men has made them more emotionally sensitive - a benefit?

There is actually a deeper and more insidious reason that cheap and fast food is so powerfully in control of our lives - drug addiction.  If you have ever tried to make a healthy version of a cheap fast food, you will quickly find that it just does not taste as good as the "real" thing.  In fact, it is so disappointing you usually don't bother making it more than once.  I have been there too many times to count. 

Why is this?  It is because fast and packaged foods are "seasoned" with chemicals that excite brain pathways to induce pleasure and addiction.  The general term for these drugs is excitotoxins.  The two most common we are all familiar with - sugar and MSG.  But in reality there are thousands of these chemicals.  They appear on ingredient labels as "natural and artificial flavors".  They make things taste really good and really addictive by poisoning certain brain pathways in the exact same way as heroin or cocaine does.  Is it no wonder people don't want to give up their fast food and packaged foods?  They are chemically addicted to them.  Sugar has been found to be more addictive than cocaine.   MSG (and the dozen forms we don't recognize) actually causes certain brain cells to swell and rupture.  Many of these excitotoxins are perfectly "natural", but then so is snake venom.  Natural does not mean something is good for you.

Kicking the fast food packaged Standard American Diet is very hard.  We are addicted.  Kicking fast food is like kicking smoking.  It is hard.  But just like smoking, it is killing us slowly.  Because it is slow we are easily able to ignore the process until it is too late.  How many smokers ignore the warning labels until they have lung cancer?  How many of you will ignore these warnings about "normal" food until after your first heart attack, or diabetes, or Alzheimer's set in.  By then it will be too late.  A fast and cheap food lifestyle may take 20 to 30 years before the first symptoms show up, but then it just gets worse destroying your quality of life for the next 30 to 50 years as you spend you life taking poisonous pharmaceutical drugs to counteract the effects of the lifestyle choices you made 20 to 30 years earlier. 

The alternative - eat to live.  Eat foods that will support an energized life that supports looking and feeling good for a long long time.  Eat to energize your brain so you can stay interested and involved in life.  Keep life exciting.  Keep loving your life because you feel good. 

That means eating simple foods, fresh foods.  The mainstay of a healthy diet is vegetables and proteins.  It is that simple.  A wide variety of non-starchy vegetables is best for most people.  Proteins include healthy meats (from pastured animals, not factory raised), fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, and vegetable proteins.  Healthy fats are also important for energy and nutrients - these include coconut oil, ghee, olive oil, nut oils, palm oil, and healthy animal fats.  Last is herbs and spices both for flavor and their many health benefits.  Always fresh, fresh, fresh. 

If it can sit on a shelf, you generally don't want to eat it.  Avoid sugars, grains, legumes (unless soaked to remove lectin toxins and you have no weight issues), dairy foods (virtually all toxic in this country), seed oils, trans fats, natural and artificial flavors, coloring agents, preservatives, chemicals of all kinds.  Anything fried is poisonous (like chips).  The big enemy is sugar, carbohydrates, and oils that can go rancid.

Fruit is in a special category.  Some fruit is good in small amounts, but most fruit is toxic when eaten in large amounts.  Refer to previous articles I have written on fructose to see these guidelines.  Pesticides are also a major issue with fruits.  Right now apples are at the top of the list as most poisonous, so they should only be eaten if purchased as organically grown.  Should everything be organically grown?  Ideally yes, but practically some fruits and vegetables are much more of a problem than others.  The problem ones need to be organically grown.  Others you don't need to worry so much about unless you have a major health problem you are dealing with.

So the basis of treatment for Andropause - male hormone failure is a fresh healthy food diet to reduce inflammation and stop insulin resistance.  Depending on your specific case certain supplements may be necessary to fight the inflammation as once these cycles get going they become self-perpetuating.  We have to break these cycles to make any progress with herbs and nutriceuticals.  But as I said before, if the diet is not corrected first, we will keep starting new bad cycles of inflammation as fast as we clean up the old cycles.  So diet is first and can not be skipped.

I know from my own life how hard this is.  I also know how at my worst I just didn't care about the consequences of my dietary choices.  All I wanted was what felt good and tasted good today.  It was not until I started noticing the first signs of brain degeneration that I got motivated to do something about my diet.  I really did not want to end up with Alzheimer's.  That was just too ugly an outcome to face.

I saw myself addicted to my favorite TV shows.  I would deny participating in many life opportunities just because I did not want to miss the next episode of "my" TV shows.  When I saw that I canceled my cable service and stopped watching TV except for the occasional Netflix movie.  I stopped all grains, dairy, and sugars 2 years ago when I learned that the inflammatory chemicals produced by every fat cell were the main cause of my brain symptoms.  I am still reducing the fat cells in my body to bring those chemicals down.

Life is getting better.  The sacrifices are becoming worth it.  They weren't at first...not for a long time.  But they are starting to pay off now.  I am 58 years old and not on any medications.  Most American males are on 5 to 10 different medications by my age.  I am looking forward to a vibrant 20 to 30+ more years instead of the ugly decline most people face.

All things of great value come at great price.       

Good Journey,
David     
   

 

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Health Challenge #8

Use only meats, fish, dairy and poultry that are free of hormones, pesticides, and toxins.

 This seems like an obvious statement, kind of like don't drink bleach, eat arsenic, or pour battery acid on your head.  Unfortunately finding non-toxic protein foods is not that easy.  Modern farming practices guarantee a poisoned food supply.  In order to mass produce food in sufficient quantities and at competitive prices growth hormones are used to grow cows, pigs, chickens, and fish at least twice as fast as normal.  The massive overcrowding in the animal "farms" and fish farms produces very unsanitary conditions so massive amounts of antibiotics have to be used to keep the disease levels down.  To mass produce the food for these huge meat factories means lots of pesticides used on the grains served as food to these food sources. Just like in people, grains are not a good food for animals.  The grain based feeds produce high levels of omega-6 oils and inflammation in the meat of the animals.  And then there is the issue of mercury in the fish and bacteria in the animal and fowl spread in the processing plants.

     So what are we to do?  Fortunately these concerns have been voiced for many years now and healthier alternatives are becoming more available.  Grass raised and range fed beef is now available (as is buffalo).  Free range raised chicken and eggs are in most stores.  Wild caught fish are healthier but you still have to be aware of the mercury concerns.

    Liquid dairy products and cheese have 8-10 times the levels of estrogens because we force our cows to produce milk all year round so limit dairy products and be sure your liver enzymes for breaking down estrogens are working well.  Avoid any homogenized milk as homogenization releases a toxin that causes atherosclerosis (xanthene oxidase).  Try to find organic and healthfully raises pork products.  Health food stores and specialty meat shops may carry these.

    

 

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Black Cumin reduces blood sugar

The common spice cumin has a long history of use for GI upset and lung conditions.  Recent research has shown it to be helpful with memory and stress.  But new research is now showing that it does an amazing job with blood sugar.  Two grams a day of this herb has been shown to reduce blood sugar an average of 62mg/dl.

 

Cumin

 

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~ Stewart B. Johnson

Hormones in milk can be dangerous

Don't think you're at risk? Think again. The average American takes in nearly a gallon of pesticides per year by eating conventionally grown fruits and vegetables.

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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

 

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